“He is right. We are not youth any longer. We don’t want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life,” a quote from All Quiet On the Western Front.There are some books that we read in our youth that have their meaning to change everytime we initially read them, verses when we reread them. When I first read this, I didn’t even want to read it. The book looked like any other small text, thick book deal, and I didn’t want to read it. However, me rereading it over the course of quarantine made me realize that there were many lessons about losing innocence, nostalgia, and friendship. I want to dive right into one of the themes right now, which is the loss of innocence and how it relates to life.
For a little bit of background, this book takes place on the German side in WWI where Paul, our main protagonist has to live his life in the trenches. He fights along new and old friends alike in the war. Along the way, Paul loses part of society’s ideals, using the latrine out in the open, begging for rations, and just being out in the battlefield. He faces many traumatic experiences throughout the war, and then he gets to have a lead due to extreme circumstances. When he arrives back at home, everybody wants to know how bad it really is out there, how much of a hero he was, and praised him for fighting for Germany. This shook him because they never felt the pain and loss of being in the front lines. Paul was one of these people before the war, giddy about joining. As soon as he went out there, he saw what no man had to see. The unnecessary death of young men, enemy soldiers up close, and most importantly the people he was with most dying around him.
I think that this video is what I want to describe right now, it describes how the fourth wall is disturbing. I want to touch on a subject on the video. The disconnect from the people at homefront and warfront is similar to somebody watching a television show or reading a book, and wanting to be part of that universe, like Harry Potter, Steven Universe, or The Office. It’s a disconnected universe and space from where the viewer is watching, so he or she can judge characters from a far and think they know everything. They are viewing things way differently, seeing newspapers about winning the war and other propaganda. These people are innocent in a way because they are being fed information to keep them safe, information that might not always be right. However, a character in a book , in this case Paul, has to see all these ugly truths in the world.
To wrap this up, the loss of innocence made Paul a ruined man. He lost all morals and when he lost everything, he had nothing. All the people out at home could never imagine what horrors those soldiers faced, even a brief second. The anguish, the deaths, the frenziness of survival. Everything is but a blur to Paul and the people at home romanticizing it weren’t paid with blood.
