Social-ficial Happiness

Throughout the year in grade ten, we have asked ourselves how our identity is shaped by the culture we live in. Whether we are concerned about our body image, or our individuality, we are attempting to learn who we are through great literature. In reading All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque, we strive to see how our understanding of happiness is affected by our society, by seeing how the survivor’s society during World War One shaped their concept of this emotion. It is so hard to glean happiness from a situation as dire as this war of attrition, except in two regards of safety and brotherhood, especially when the benefits of such a thing are few and intangible until long afterwards. There are moments of happiness where they “become so fastidious that [they] half smoke [their] cigars.” (238)

Today the effects of war are more visible through the diagnoses of PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), and the widespread influence of communication. The media can offer the people whatever they want, from anywhere in the world. Video games where young adults can experience a simulated war has desensitized them to the fact that in the war they are killing real people with real jobs and real families. The real world is not within their scope of understanding because our society has dulled them and glorified it in a way that parallels the early 1900’s. The full-frontal assault on our sense of humanity wears us down and we begin to see the war as senseless.

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Senseless is the last word that I would use to summarize All Quiet on the Western Front. All that any reader has to do is skim through Chapter 6 to see how war attacks us on all fronts. The smells of reeking flesh and corpse rats, the sounds of the bombs dropping and flares streaking. The feel of blood and dirt covering every part of their bodies. The sights and gratuitous descriptions littering the sixth chapter were enough to make me shut my own eyes to the horrors they saw like “men living with their skulls blown open;... [and] soldiers run with their two feet cut off”. (134)

If any sense is lost in this novel it is the men’s common sense, their humanity. Men reverting back to their most animal instincts of survival is a large motif. War cannot be senseless, it is not in its nature. No matter how desensitized one grows towards ending a life, you are risking your life being senseless in the line of fire cannot. The instinct “is far quicker, much more sure, less fallible, than consciousness” (56) and requires full reliance on your senses.

There is no path to finding happiness in the trenches, except in the trust you place in your fellow soldiers. The only time the narrator, Paul Baumer displays any trace of being, of feeling happy is when he is with his comrades. When he is out alone with only Katczinsky and two dead geese for company “[they] are brothers” (96). Beasts only find happiness in the simplest needs of life; food and/or safety. Many parts of the book are dedicated to the joy of having food: most of the 1st chapter, eating geese with Kat, and the beginning of Chapter 10.

By today’s standards, wars are experienced through the television. A song by Chad Kroeger includes the lyrics, “We watch it happen over there/and then just turn it off.” Through media outlets and video games our generation has become desensitized to the gruesomeness of war and battle. In the novel All Quiet on the Western Front, there are so many terrible, gratuitous depictions that show the truth of the war that those contrasting moments of happiness, peace or calm really stand out. As we can see at the end of the book peace doesn’t necessarily mean happiness, but the comradery of the young men and the safety of humanity’s needs are what really make Paul happy.