So, seminar one! We have been reading All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque. I really enjoyed this book as it follows the tale of a young soldier, Paul, and his friends in World War two. It is somewhat anti-war, but it is a great book and I definitely recommend it to anyone who would like to read a good war story!
My Reflection:
Reactions:
There were several opinions expressed in this seminar that made me think harder about this book and the project that we’re studying. Helen and Dusty both made good comments about war in general. Helen said that, “war takes and takes,” and it really does. Paul could no longer be the person that he used to be because slowly, it was all being stripped away in return for the instinct to react well on the battlefield, and the ability to go on even after a friend dies in the war because he just had to accept things like that. Dusty said, “war’s an addiction,” which really adds on to Helen’s idea. War is a completely alien world to most of us, something that can be talked about and considered, but not really understood until you participated in it. Once you become integrated into war, it’s very hard to pull yourself out of it, because as I mentioned before, it’s so foreign to what we do in everyday civilian life. I believe that that disconnection makes everything about war difficult and dangerous. You can’t make any decisions or opinions about something that you’ve never experienced, so that even leaders of countries send them in somewhat blindly. It’s a scary thought. This is what Dusty and Helen’s comments made me think about.
A Question from Seminar: Was Paul’s death the best thing for him?
A: It’s really hard to think about Paul’s death being a good thing. However, at the exact same time, there is another question that you have to consider: Did he have any chance at life beyond the army? He spent so much time working with life or death decisions, direct orders, and a true understanding of what it is to be at war. If he’d gone home, he would have to completely relearn and refine every single aspect of society that the war had so harshly stripped away from him. It’d be hard, and he’d be surrounded by people who wanted to know what war was like, what happened that made them lose, why couldn’t they have done a better job? He’d have no real way to answer them either. So even though he loved people like his family and friends, he would still be incredibly alone because of this factor.
If his only life was in the army, because that was the civilization he was used to, then what happened when everyone died? He lost Haie to a gunshot in the lung, Mϋller to one in the side. It is assumed that Kropp killed himself after he left the hospital having his leg amputated. Kat, Paul carried on his back after he’d been shot in the leg, and still he died because of a sliver through the skull. If the army was Paul’s only life with people who would actually understand him, what happened when he was the last one left? That would be the hardest thing, being alone in that war, which was the only place that they understood you. Of course, he could always make new friends, maybe help out the new recruits, but eventually the war would’ve ended and he would’ve gone home, which returns me to the first paragraph. I don’t believe that death was the best thing for him, because I myself believe that if you look, there is always something or someone worth living for. However, I believe that this was the only way that he’d die peacefully, and is one of the happiest endings he could’ve had: on duty, surrounded by the life that he had chosen and people who he could relate to.
Connections:
The thought of Paul’s life after the war, or at least outside of the war, reminded me of the movie The Shawshank Redemption. In this analogy, war is like the prison, all of these people using cigars and other oddities as currency, only able to understand each other and only able to do your best. Both the prisoners and the soldiers had to follow direct orders and the veterans reacted far more calmly to the atrocities or shelling (in AQotWF). In the Shawshank Redemption, they used a term that I believe applies very well to both stories: institutionalized. To be institutionalized is to be completely adjusted to the prison or war, unable to turn back to normal everyday civilian life without feeling a sense of complete loss. Eventually you want to stay, simply because it’s familiar, it’s something that you understand, and there’s a sort of routine to everything that becomes as regular as breathing to you. I believe that Paul, like Red in the Shawshank Redemption, had become institutionalized, and unable to turn back civilian life that had continued to go on while they were away. There were many new things that hadn’t been there when they left, and it wasn’t like going home anymore; it was like going back to some Picasso rendition of your home, already complete and fine without you. I feel that there were many similarities between these two and it’s fascinating because the more I think about it, the more similarities I see.
Lori’s Choice:
1) “It is a great brotherhood, which adds something of the good-fellowship of a folk-song of the feeling of solidarity of convicts, and of the desperate loyalty to one another of men condemned to death, to a condition of life arising out of the midst of danger, out of the tension and forlornness of death – seeking in a wholly unpathetic way a fleeting enjoyment of the hours as they come. If one wants to appraise it, it is both heroic and banal- but who wants to do that?” page 272
2) I feel that this quote captures the truth of war very well, partly because it’s mostly unbiased. It balances the grimness of war with the strength in fellowship, how close they are. It mentions people as “Men condemned to death,” which considering the book’s ending, and how in one battle, they lost over eighty men in one barracks alone, seems very correct. However, it also mentions “the desperate loyalty to one another,” and how, “It is a great brotherhood,” which depicts the atrocities that they’ve seen together as a sort of bond that pushes them together. Even if they wouldn’t have liked each other before the war, they now trust each other with their very lives, because they don’t have much room much bickering. I feel that this quote shows both the harsh reality and the finer points very well.
3) If I were to represent the idea in the quote, I would use a combination of art and poetry. It would have a black frame that was coated in crushed mirror or glass if I was allowed, and the background would be a series of dark colors. The words would be stark white and have little segments set here and there around the depictions. This would be a painting with a picture for each segment. The segments would probably morph from a dislocated view of war, the softer depiction that everyone knows, then would move to the truths of war before ending in something speaking about the brotherhood and maybe a picture of hands, one clasping the other as though to help each other up. They would be wearing uniforms from both sides of the war (Germany and France for example).
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