Okay, so I’m typing this very late at night so bear with me if I make spelling mistakes or my thoughts sound scrambled.
At any rate, the callback to All Quiet within the last paragraph of Not So Quiet is undeniable and I really wanted to comment on it. Here’s a side by side comparison:
“He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front. He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come.” (All Quiet)
“Her soul died under a radiant silver moon in the spring of 1918 on the
side of a blood-spattered trench. Around her lay the mangled dead and the
dying. Her body was untouched, her heart beat calmly, the blood coursed as
ever through her veins. But looking deep into those emotionless eyes one
wondered if they had suffered much before the soul had left them. Her face
held an expression of resignation, as though she had ceased to hope that the
end might come.” (Not So Quiet)
The subtle differences are striking. For Paul, death is a release. It is the end, and he no longer has to suffer. For Nellie, the war ending means nothing to her because she still has to deal with the trauma inflicted by it. Every day means a new battle for her. Paul does not appear to have suffered. Nellie does, and will continue to do so as long as she is alive. Paul is calm, Nellie resigned. To be honest, I feel like we leave Nellie with where we start with Paul–resigned and unable to think beyond the war. Although I didn’t like this book as much as I liked All Quiet, I did like this sort of full circle callback to All Quiet.
The ending of Not So Quiet also reminds me of the very first paragraph in All Quiet, mentioning how it’s about men who even though they escaped shells and bombs were still destroyed by the war. And that’s how Not So Quiet ends–Nellie surrounded by death caused by bombardment. She makes it out, yes, but there is still irreparable damage within her.
What I also noticed is that we don’t start All Quiet with Paul enlisting. We meet Paul in 1915-16. He’s been in the war for a while and watched his friends and comrades die, and at this point he’s matter-of-fact, numb, and repressing much of his emotions, outside of brief flashes of strong emotion.
We meet Nellie while she’s still “new”. She’s full of rage at the injustice, but all that dies when Tosh dies, and Nellie becomes depressed, numb, withdrawn, and disillusioned in a similar way to Paul. It makes me wonder if Paul too had a breaking point, especially with what we hear about training and Himmelstoss. In many ways the two end in a similar place. Maybe these stories show a common progression for the mental trauma of the war, but the stories simply decided to focus on different aspects and different situations.
Another thing that’s also interesting thing we see in Not So Quiet that we don’t in All Quiet is Nellie’s vocalization of her anti-war ideals. In All Quiet, from the trenches, Paul writes to his mother that everything is going well and life isn’t so bad on the front. When he goes on leave for the first time, he lets the hometown folk he speaks with drone on about war propaganda while they try to juice him for details about his experience on the front. Although we as readers see his anti-war perspective, he never really fights against the “doing your bit” mentality to anyone. Nellie starts off the same with her family. However, when she first goes on leave and has been broken by the war and the immense trauma she’s experienced, she makes it very clear to her family, especially her mother, on her beliefs about aiding the war effort. For this, she is met with nothing but backlash and threats to her spot in her Aunt’s will. I think both of these books highlight the extreme social pressures put on the youth during this time period, but Not So Quiet dives a bit deeper into what one might experience if they attempted to fight against pro-war brainwashing.
It’s such a contrast from the angry Nelly we see at the beginning of the book. I knew that, more than likely, Paul was once angry, and we only ever saw him after he was numbed, but the change in Nelly from chapter to chapter was horrifying, especially at the end.
I thought it was interesting to compare the two ending paragraphs in Not So Quiet and All Quiet. You could definitely argue that a part of Nellie died even though she survived the war. I like the way that you circled Nellie at the end of the book back to Paul in the beginning. They both have been desensitized to the deaths that are happening all around them. I think that they both lose hope for the end of the war. Paul is released, and Nellie almost seems to accept that she has no choice or say in the war continuing. There is nothing else she can do besides go numb like Paul was in the beginning. They both understand that there is no use trying to explain the horrors of WWI to friends and family because they just wouldn’t understand.