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Chyeah, just wondering if anybody would like to edit/peer review the essay. Thank you ^^
Tony Sexton 10/19/06
Eng 102.6 Prof. Jonsberg
The Jump of Personalities
Being under a great amount of stress can alter one’s mind and ability to function properly. Their reactions are different, how they deal with the problem is changed. In All Quiet on the Western Front, the soldiers go through a change of reactions and personalities on the battlefield.
A flaw of the human design is that we tend to restart our brains when we are catapulted into a severe and intense conflict. One of the first things that pops up on the human brain’s hard drive is the primal instinct to survive and make it out alive. When Paul is alone on the battlefield, bullets flying over him, bombs going off left and right, he finds himself in a wet hole. He clings to his knife and hides in a corner of the hole. When he hears a man over him, “I do not think at all, I make no decision- I strike madly at home”(pg216). We then advance in our restart system and the next file is the Neanderthal one. How he now believes that this dead man’s wife now belongs to himself. “Does she belong to me now? Perhaps by this act she becomes mine.”(pg222) How a man killed another and now the dead man’s wife is now a possession of the victor.
Another example of the change of personalities is how they forget how to live and only how to kill. How the soldiers transform into these different beings that don’t have the human rationality. First they mutate into an animal, “We have become wild beasts. We do not fight, we defend ourselves against annihilation.” (pg112). They then completely lose their souls and turn into machines. “If we were not automata at that moment…” (pg115). Their final and horrible transformation is into a zombie, a mindless creation that only knows how to kill. “We are insensible, dead men…still able to run and kill” (pg116). Then, “The evening benediction begins.” (pg118). They are blessed by the night and change from zombies to humans again.
War can even change a man into a cowering fool. “He has his face buried in his hands…like a child creeps under my arm, his head close to my breast” (pg61). The fight, the sounds, the utter fear spread across the battlefield makes even the most grown man weep and cry and breakdown into a baby, crying in dread.
An average man has a hard time coping with stress on a daily basis. There is a pop quiz in class, you get into a car accident, you remember you have to pay your credit card bill. But to be tossed into an area where stress and the factor of life and death is flickering itself around you, changes your perception and your reactions tremendously.
Tony Sexton 10/19/06
Eng 102.6 Prof. Jonsberg
The Jump of Personalities
Being under a great amount of stress can alter one’s mind and ability to function properly. Their reactions are different, how they deal with the problem is changed. In All Quiet on the Western Front, the soldiers go through a change of reactions and personalities on the battlefield.
A flaw of the human design is that we tend to restart our brains when we are catapulted into a severe and intense conflict. One of the first things that pops up on the human brain’s hard drive is the primal instinct to survive and make it out alive. When Paul is alone on the battlefield, bullets flying over him, bombs going off left and right, he finds himself in a wet hole. He clings to his knife and hides in a corner of the hole. When he hears a man over him, “I do not think at all, I make no decision- I strike madly at home”(pg216). We then advance in our restart system and the next file is the Neanderthal one. How he now believes that this dead man’s wife now belongs to himself. “Does she belong to me now? Perhaps by this act she becomes mine.”(pg222) How a man killed another and now the dead man’s wife is now a possession of the victor.
Another example of the change of personalities is how they forget how to live and only how to kill. How the soldiers transform into these different beings that don’t have the human rationality. First they mutate into an animal, “We have become wild beasts. We do not fight, we defend ourselves against annihilation.” (pg112). They then completely lose their souls and turn into machines. “If we were not automata at that moment…” (pg115). Their final and horrible transformation is into a zombie, a mindless creation that only knows how to kill. “We are insensible, dead men…still able to run and kill” (pg116). Then, “The evening benediction begins.” (pg118). They are blessed by the night and change from zombies to humans again.
War can even change a man into a cowering fool. “He has his face buried in his hands…like a child creeps under my arm, his head close to my breast” (pg61). The fight, the sounds, the utter fear spread across the battlefield makes even the most grown man weep and cry and breakdown into a baby, crying in dread.
An average man has a hard time coping with stress on a daily basis. There is a pop quiz in class, you get into a car accident, you remember you have to pay your credit card bill. But to be tossed into an area where stress and the factor of life and death is flickering itself around you, changes your perception and your reactions tremendously.