How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
I become faint, all at once I cannot do any more. I won't revile any more, it is senseless, I could drop down and never rise up again. (2.53)
Paul realizes the need to suppress his body's emotional and physical reaction to the horrible things he's sees. He won't be able to survive if he continues to react in such a way.
Quote #2
My limbs move supplely, I feel my joints strong, I breathe the air deeply. The night lives, I live. I feel a hunger, greater than comes from the belly alone. (2.58)
What kind of hunger does Paul refer to here? He seems very physically alive at this moment, but not necessarily emotionally alive.
Quote #3
The question revives, more particularly as he hears there's no more beer in the canteen. "It's not only Himmelstoss, there are lots of them. As sure as they get a stripe or a star they become different men, just as though they'd swallowed concrete." (3.54)
The lust for power makes certain authority figures less human.
Quote #4
"That's the uniform," I suggest.
"Roughly speaking it is," says Kat, and prepares for a long speech; "but the root of the matter lies elsewhere. For instance, if you train a dog to eat potatoes and then afterwards put a piece of meat in front of him, he'll snap at it, it's his nature. And if you give a man a little bit of authority he behaves just the same way, he snaps at it too. The things are precisely the same. In himself man is essentially a beast, only he butters it over like a slice of bread with a little decorum. The army is based on that; one man must always have power over the other. The mischief is merely that each one has much too much power." (3.55)
Kat suggests it is part of human nature to yearn for power over humans and that war merely satiates this yearning. We can't help but think about Lord of the Flies by William Golding, for that novel explores this very idea of how exactly power corrupts and of how much humans love to have power over each other.
Quote #5
We wait and wait. By midday what I expected happens. One of the recruits has a fit. I have been watching him for a long time, grinding his teeth and opening and shutting his fists. These hunted, protruding eyes, we know them too well. During the last few hours he has had merely the appearance of calm. He had collapsed like a rotten tree. (6.50)
When Paul uses the word "hunted," we can't help but think that the soldier's primal instincts of survival have kicked in. War causes the most primitive of human feelings and emotions (the likes of which humans have contended with for millions of years) to surface.
Quote #6
He listens and for a moment his eye becomes clear. Then again he has the glowering eyes of a mad dog, he is silent, he shoves me aside. (6.54)
As the novel wears on, Paul begins to compare his fellow men to animals and to use animalistic imagery. This claustrophobic recruit can't stand being in the trench any longer. He begins to listen to reason, but his emotions get the better of him.
Quote #7
We have become wild beasts. We do not fight, we defend ourselves against annihilation. It is not against men that we fling our bombs, what do we know of men in this moment when Death with hands and helmets is hunting us down – now, for the first time in three days we can see his face, now, for the first time in three days we can oppose him; we feel a mad anger. No longer do we lie helpless, waiting on the scaffold, we can destroy and kill, to save ourselves, to save ourselves and be revenged. (6.73)
Again, Paul personifies Death, capitalizing the word and describing it as having "hands and helmets." He identifies the enemy to be Death itself. What has changed here that causes the soldiers to feel "a mad anger"?
Quote #8
If your own father came over with them you would not hesitate to fling a bomb into him. (6.74)
War is greater than the idea of family. The soldiers have come to a point in which they believe in killing more than they do in their own family.
Quote #9
We can hardly control ourselves when our hunted glance lights on the form of some other man. We are insensible, dead men, who through some trick, some dreadful magic, are still able to run and kill. (6.81)
What do you think is the "trick" or the "dreadful magic" that allows these soldiers to still be "able to run and kill"?