Immaturity and Power

Through out the chapters 1-3 in the novel All Quiet on the Western Front, we see the effect of what power can do to people. It can--in all reality--make a person go mad. A re-accuring motif that has shown up was childhood to man hood and how they don't have the in-between stage, they were forced to go from innocence to experience already, talking in language terms.

We have already talked about how the men were told to be mature but when it comes to power, they are like little children who climb trees in the park they don't care what they do, they are careless. Like how people are when they are acting "immature", they don't care what they do because they don't act their age and don't know how to take the high road rather than the low road.

So when you put Power in someones arms, they turn immature and this topic really made me upset while I was reading through chapter 3. The whole situation with Himmelstoss, and hitting him with a bed cover and almost raping/abusing him until the fact that they could have killed him by putting a pillow over his air way, made me hate Tjaden, Paul, Haie, just everyone that was involved with this whole ordeal.

This was to the fact that the power from what they had from just being a little older than the poor kid, almost drove them to the state of insanity. Causing them do such harm to a poor kid of the army. This topic drove me insane reading it and I hope that when I am in power of something I do not go back to the immature state that I have grown out of.