All Quiet On The Western Front Comparative Analysis
Surviving in Storytelling
The act of killing is deeply intimate. It is both incredibly personal and emotionally devastating for all involved. Two people become forever connected in a tragic way. In All Quiet on the Western Front and The Things They Carried, characters Paul Baumer and Tim O’Brien both struggle with guilt following killing. The way in which they fixate the men they kill is particularly fascinating. They enter into a fantasy in which they imagine themselves living out these men’s lives. Treating the enemy in such a way metaphorically brings these dead men back to life and allows Paul and Tim to escape the overbearing guilt of killing these people. Due to the large generational gap separating these two novels, Paul and Tim are …show more content…
The interlay of the blue flowers and the dead man is an overlay of the tragic nature of death amid natural beauty. Most importantly however, the blue flowers serve as an anchor for the rest of the Tim’s fabrication. The blue flowers are a symbol of ornate beauty, which is something hard pressed to find in Vietnam amid all the tragedy. Tim works this sense of beauty into the rest of his story, which turns from morbid to optimistic. This story based off the beauty of the flowers and Tim as the Vietcong soldier allows him to overcome his guilt. Immediately after the flowers are in view, the grotesque descriptions of the man’s morbidity cease. He fixates on the man’s beautiful past, his passion for education, and his romantic escapades, (122) which is superimposed with natural beauty like the pollen that drifts over his untouched nose (123) and the “sunlight sparkled against the buckle of his ammunition belt (123). Tim O’Brien has immersed himself in this mans life as a reflection of his own, thus bringing his fantasy to life. He ends his commentary on the man with “he knew he would fall dead and then wake up in the stories of his village and people” (124). In creating an eternal life for this man as a reflection of himself, he frees himself from guilt. This is …show more content…
For the greater part of the novel Paul relies on dehumanizing the enemy to survive the deep sense of guilt that emerges from killing other humans. However, when he is forced to take shelter in the same trench as the man he has killed, he needs a new coping mechanism to survive. Like Tim, Paul begins to see past the surface level of the dead soldier. He looks for familial ties in order to connect to this man. He says, “I see you are a man like me... now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship… He connects so deeply that he begins a fantasy about the man’s life where he sees himself as the dead soldier. He asks, “What would his wife look like? Does she belong to me now?” (Remarque 222) This is a very bold statement: it is as if by killing the man he somehow earns his wife. Even more frightening is when Paul says the “dead man is bound up with my life… I swear blindly that I mean to live only for his sake and his family… I have killed the printer, Gerard Duval. I must be a printer, I think confusedly, be a printer, printer....” I must become the printer now” (225). Part of this confession is that Paul feels bad for killing the man, and he hopes that reaching out to his family will make him feel better. However, the fantasy of adopting Gerard’s occupation speaks to a deeper truth. It is as if adopting this man’s life will keep the legacy of the
The act of killing is deeply intimate. It is both incredibly personal and emotionally devastating for all involved. Two people become forever connected in a tragic way. In All Quiet on the Western Front and The Things They Carried, characters Paul Baumer and Tim O’Brien both struggle with guilt following killing. The way in which they fixate the men they kill is particularly fascinating. They enter into a fantasy in which they imagine themselves living out these men’s lives. Treating the enemy in such a way metaphorically brings these dead men back to life and allows Paul and Tim to escape the overbearing guilt of killing these people. Due to the large generational gap separating these two novels, Paul and Tim are …show more content…
The interlay of the blue flowers and the dead man is an overlay of the tragic nature of death amid natural beauty. Most importantly however, the blue flowers serve as an anchor for the rest of the Tim’s fabrication. The blue flowers are a symbol of ornate beauty, which is something hard pressed to find in Vietnam amid all the tragedy. Tim works this sense of beauty into the rest of his story, which turns from morbid to optimistic. This story based off the beauty of the flowers and Tim as the Vietcong soldier allows him to overcome his guilt. Immediately after the flowers are in view, the grotesque descriptions of the man’s morbidity cease. He fixates on the man’s beautiful past, his passion for education, and his romantic escapades, (122) which is superimposed with natural beauty like the pollen that drifts over his untouched nose (123) and the “sunlight sparkled against the buckle of his ammunition belt (123). Tim O’Brien has immersed himself in this mans life as a reflection of his own, thus bringing his fantasy to life. He ends his commentary on the man with “he knew he would fall dead and then wake up in the stories of his village and people” (124). In creating an eternal life for this man as a reflection of himself, he frees himself from guilt. This is …show more content…
For the greater part of the novel Paul relies on dehumanizing the enemy to survive the deep sense of guilt that emerges from killing other humans. However, when he is forced to take shelter in the same trench as the man he has killed, he needs a new coping mechanism to survive. Like Tim, Paul begins to see past the surface level of the dead soldier. He looks for familial ties in order to connect to this man. He says, “I see you are a man like me... now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship… He connects so deeply that he begins a fantasy about the man’s life where he sees himself as the dead soldier. He asks, “What would his wife look like? Does she belong to me now?” (Remarque 222) This is a very bold statement: it is as if by killing the man he somehow earns his wife. Even more frightening is when Paul says the “dead man is bound up with my life… I swear blindly that I mean to live only for his sake and his family… I have killed the printer, Gerard Duval. I must be a printer, I think confusedly, be a printer, printer....” I must become the printer now” (225). Part of this confession is that Paul feels bad for killing the man, and he hopes that reaching out to his family will make him feel better. However, the fantasy of adopting Gerard’s occupation speaks to a deeper truth. It is as if adopting this man’s life will keep the legacy of the