3/21/22 Major Post No. 3, All Quiet on the Western Front

All Quiet on the Western Front cover redesign

BEFORE READING: See my previous micro-blog for some context on the book.

Analysis: Each section of this diagram of the human brain is in a different color. The blue section is the frontal lobe, responsible for voluntary movement and expression. The purple section is the parietal lobe, responsible for physical senses. The orange-yellow section is the temporal lobe, partially responsible for memory. The green section is the occipital lobe, responsible for vision. The red section is the cerebellum, responsible for balance.

    I used dialogue within each section of the diagram to convey war's harmful effects on every section of the mind. The only dialogue used is simple, and consists of almost entirely single-word sentences. The primitive thoughts used here are meant to symbolize the degradation of one's mind in war, and the utter destruction of the psyche.

Frontal lobe (blue): The use of military customs in the frontal lobe is meant to display how in even the everyday man, the conditioning for warfare can be drilled into the mind. Baumer and his friends are no soldiers. They are just normal, peaceful men thrust into a chaotic world of death and violence. In this world, they can do nothing but give in to military proceedings or die.

Parietal lobe (purple): The only things sensed by the parietal lobe in this cover are pain and emptiness. The repetition of "pain" is used to show the never-ending hurt caused by war, and the one instance of "empty" communicates that there is not much else to be felt in such a hellish environment.

Temporal lobe (orange-yellow): The temporal lobe contains sounds from war. Gunshots, shelling, and screams are some of the first things that come to mind when one imagines a frightened soldier in the trenches. Yet even outside of these trenches, nightmarish memories can still haunt the soldier. Try as one might to forget the horrors, war lasts much longer than the last bullet fired.

Occipital lobe (green): The only thing communicated in the occipital lobe is the vision of death. WWI, being one of the bloodiest conflicts of all time, was no stranger to this. Wherever one looked throughout battlefields, all that could be seen was an exorbitant degree of death.

Cerebellum (red): Finally, the idea of falling is used to summarize the ultimate mind-breaker that is war. Baumer, and all the soldiers around him, find themselves cascading into a vast abyss of terror.