Jaelyn Hill The Psychological Effect of War: Melancholy
The novel “All Quiet on the Western Front’ is about Paul Baumer, who joins World War I. He experiences things that are unimaginable to the common man. The psychological effect Paul experiences throughout his time in the war is the feeling of melancholy. Situations such as Paul’s leave, his first kill, and his death all back up the idea of depression.
In the novel, when Paul goes on leave if shows how his mindset changes because of war. He was once excited about the idea, but it changes after some time. ‘They are different men here, men I cannot properly understand, whom I envy and despise.” (169). During leave, Paul noticed that people back home have a whole different idea of war. He also seems a bit jumpy while on leave. “After I have been startled a couple of times in the street by the screaming of the tramcars.”(165). This displays the
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He feels “powerless” and proceeds to whisper “No”(219). The whole situation is very depressing and shows how much Paul was broken. He then desperately gives the dying man some water and tends to his wounds. “I want to help you, Comrade, camarade, camarade, camarade”(220). This shows how desperate Paul was to help the fallen man. On (223), he expresses that he “did not want to” kill the French soldier. He even suggests to write to his wife as a way of saying sorry. Overall, Paul’s first kill really upsetted him, and was a depressing moment.
When Kat dies, the mood is somber. He thinks that he has fainted, when in reality Kat has passed. Paul couldn’t believe it when someone commented that Kat was “stone cold dead”(290). This shows how dubious the whole situation was to him. He couldn’t bear losing Kat, who was one of his friends before the war. He seems to refrain himself of showing any real emotions. In conclusion, losing a friend like Kat showed how Paul’s war experience was
In my opinion Paul is saying that the diseases were nobody's fault and could have been avoided, but war, in comparison, could have been avoided and is mans fault. War in the end does kill Paul, but not before his closest friends are killed. Katczinsky is hit by shrapnel and is horrifically described by the author here: "Kat got a splinter of shrapnel in his head on the way. The war has ripped apart Paul's life, and now his closest friend is dead. The final chapter describes Paul's last days and how he is resigned to dying.
That had happened because of a traumatizing experience when he was in kindergarten. His brother, Erik, and Erik's friend, Vincent, had sprayed Paul's eyes with white paint. (Pg. 264) Before Paul had remembered that incident, Paul had always thought he was foolish. On page 35 it explains why he thought he was irrelevant. It says "I was the boy who had not listened and who was now paying the price." That shows that Paul had always thought low of himself because his parents never told him the truth. This decision made Paul feel weak and miserable because he had always thought it was his fault. On page 265 Paul gets his parents to admit what had actually happened to make him blind. They said they didn't tell him the truth because they didn't want him to hate his brother. What Paul mentions was quite sad. He said,"So you figured it would be better if I just hated myself". (265) In that scene, his mom and dad both broke down crying. All along, Paul had felt guilt in himself for something he hadn't done.
... While the corpse represents each of these concepts, in the end it is Paul’s faith – his own luck – that saves his life once again. What, upon first glance, appears to be a hectic and confused account of a destructive shelling becomes a wonderfully connected verse of one soldier’s struggle to preserve himself against all odds. What more can be said about Paul?
... Paul wanted to get out of the war. Maybe Paul died on the right day; he loves quiet, and he dies on possibly the quietest day of the whole war. Maybe he just wanted to end his misery. In any case, Paul cannot accept the philosophy of war and thus gives himself up for death.
dead friend Kemmerich and when Paul and Kat must beat a recruit unconscious to stop
All our senses are assaulted: we see newly dead soldiers and long-dead corpses tossed up together in a cemetery (Chapter 4); we hear the unearthly screaming of the wounded horses (Chapter 4); we see and smell three layers of bodies, swelling up and belching gases, dumped into a huge shell hole (Chapter 6); and we can almost touch the naked bodies hanging in trees and the limbs lying around the battlefield (Chapter 9). The crying of the horses is especially terrible. Horses have nothing to do with making war. Their bodies gleam beautifully as they parade along--until the shells strike them. To Paul, their dying cries represent all of nature accusing Man, the great destroyer.
Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front is one of the greatest war novels of all time. It is a story, not of Germans, but of men, who even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war. The entire purpose of this novel is to illustrate the vivid horror and raw nature of war and to change the popular belief that war has an idealistic and romantic character. The story centers on Paul Baümer, who enlists in the German army with glowing enthusiasm. In the course of war, though, he is consumed by it and in the end is "weary, broken, burnt out, rootless, and without hope" (Remarque page #).
Imagine being in an ongoing battle where friends and others are dying. All that is heard are bullets being shot, it smells like gas is near, and hearts race as the times goes by. This is similar to what war is like. In the novel All Quiet on the Western Front, the narrator, Paul Baumer, and his friends encounter the ideals of suffering, death, pain, and despair. There is a huge change in these men; at the beginning of the novel they are enthusiastic about going into the war. After they see what war is really like, they do not feel the same way about it. During the war the men experience many feelings especially the loss of loved ones. These feelings are shown through their first experience at training camp, during the actual battles, and in the hospital.
He realizes that he has to lose feeling to survive, “That I have looked far as the only possibility of existence after this annihilation of a human emotion” (194). Paul loses all feeling, which may be one of the main factors keeping him alive in battle, so that he does not allow himself to process the violence and horror to which he is exposed. Even in the short time where he thinks about all that he has lost, he is immediately overwhelmed with feelings and there is no time for this on the battlefront. Paul has no empathy for the enemy and kills without even thinking, “We have lost all feeling for one another.
“I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another (263).” Powerful changes result from horrifying experiences. Paul Baumer, the protagonists of Erich Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front utters these words signifying the loss of his humanity and the reduction to a numbed creature, devoid of emotion. Paul’s character originates in the novel as a young adult, out for an adventure, and eager to serve his country. He never realizes the terrible pressures that war imposes on soldiers, and at the conclusion of the book the empty shell resembling Paul stands testament to this. Not only does Paul lose himself throughout the course of the war, but he loses each of his 20 classmates who volunteered with him, further emphasizing the terrible consequences of warfare. The heavy psychological demands of life in the trenches and the harsh reality of war strip Paul of his humanity and leave him with a body devoid of all sentiment and feeling.
Around the end of the story, Paul decides to run off to New York for a week to finally live his dreams. However, by making his dreams a reality he exposes himself to something he wasn't prepared for, the truth. At first, everything is all Paul ever wanted it be. He is able to finally live life as he sees fit. He spends his money without care, and is able to live up to all his lies. (Although this reaches its climax when Paul meets a young man in the street), "The young man offered to show Paul the night side of the town, and the two boys went out together after dinner, not returning to the hotel until seven o'clock the next morning" (Cather 11). After this, Paul's fake reality falls apart quickly. Faced with the reality that he will have to return home, Paul decides to take his own life. Instead of ending it quickly with a gun, he decides to go a different route, "When the right moment came, he jumped. As he fell, the folly of his haste occurred to him with merciless clearness, the vastness of what he had left undone. There flashed through his brain, clearer than ever before, the blue of Adriatic water, the yellow of Algerian sands. He felt something strike his chest, and that his body was being thrown swiftly through the air, on and on, immeasurably far and fast, while his limbs were gently relaxed. Then, because the picture-making mechanism was crushed, the disturbing visions flashed into black,
Paul believes that he was tricked into joining the army and fighting in the war. This makes him very bitter towards the people who lied to him. This is why he lost his respect and trust towards the society. Teachers and parents were the big catalysts for the ki...
People who have actually been through war know how horrible it is. Society on the other hand, while it believes it knows the horrors of war, can never understand or sympathize with a soldier’s situation. The only people who can understand war is those who have been through it so they can often feel alone if they are out of the military. Paul cannot even give a straight answer to his own father about his dad’s inquiries about war. Paul’s dad does not understand that people who have been in the war can in no way truly express the horrible things that that have seen and experienced. Nor can Paul fit in with the society who does not understand him. Paul and so many others were brought into the war so young that they know of nothing else other than war. Paul held these views on society as he said, “We will be superfluous even to ourselves, we will grow older, a few will adapt themselves, some others will merely submit, and most will be bewildered;-the years will pass by and in the end we shall fall in to ruin.
World War I had a great effect on the lives of Paul Baumer and the young men of his generation. These boys’ lives were dramatically changed by the war, and “even though they may have escaped its shells, [they] were destroyed by the war” (preface). In Erich Maria Remarque’s novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, Paul Baumer and the rest of his generation feel separated from the other men, lose their innocence, and experience comradeship as a result of the war.
All Quiet on the Western Front is the story of Paul Baumer’s service as a soldier in the German army during World War I. Paul and his classmates enlist together, share experiences together, grow together, share disillusionment over the loss of their youth, and the friends even experience the horrors of death-- together. Though the book is a novel, it gives the reader insights into the realities of war. In this genre, the author is free to develop the characters in a way that brings the reader into the life of Paul Baumer and his comrades. The novel frees the author from recounting only cold, sterile facts. This approach allows the reader to experience what might have been only irrelevant facts if presented in a textbook.