All Quiet On The Western Front: An Analysis

This problem is one that has many names, and has been there since the very first war. Author Jan Karon summarized it best when she said, “In World War One they called it shell shock. Second time around, they called it battle fatigue. After ‘Nam, it was post traumatic stress disorder.” We know that soldiers enter another war when they come home, but do we ever consider the possibility that they were fighting more than one war out there? The novel All Quiet on the Western Front, the movie Gallipoli, and various poems written during WWI seem to think so. Soldiers on the battlefield have been enduring with the mental wear and tear of death, violence, and the loss of friends making it a two front war. In All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque is a great look into the mind of a soldier on the front lines. While the main character, Paul, is on leave back in his hometown he struggles to keep his sanity. He is trying to keep those memories suppressed because in his mind, “It is too dangerous for me to put these things into words. I am afraid they might then become …show more content…
The soldiers kept pushing forward and dying and dying until eventually there is no one left. Also, throughout the film the main characters Frank and Archy are losing their innocence by seeing the death and tragedy of comrades. At the beginning Archy didn’t want to fight and then he decided to go and fight and be a runner for the generals. Since he wasn’t fighting he saw what everyone else was going through. He saw all his brothers die and he wasn’t able to anything about it. In the movie Archie is running as fast as he can to try to convince the general to cancel the next fleet of men. He most likely will suffer from PTSD because he wasn’t able to save Frank. This is an example of a war in their mind other than in the the front