All Quiet on the Western Front: The Significance of Fiction
I picked up All Quiet on the Western Front this past winter in a bid to watch the Netflix adaptation of the script, reading it over the course of a family holiday to Oslo where the bitter season chokes all but a dreary six hours of daylight — two of which would be missed by my habit of going to bed late and waking up later. This schedule meant plenty of time on the couch reading Brian Murdoch’s translation of Remarque’s All Quiet, and by the end of the trip, I had finished the slim book, a total of 200 pages.
I am not a fast reader, and I’ve never been able to devour books in concentrated amounts of time. I always find myself counting down to chapter ends or section breaks, and so to me this modest rate of 40 pages per day was noteworthy for two reasons.
The text seemed to flow naturally off the page as I was pulled further and further into the book, and
I was easily lulled into the setting and plot of the book almost as if I were tracking an internal monologue.
In most texts, there is a great amount of effort to be put into extracting value from the content that is read. For the most part this work goes on in the background, processing information, drawing conclusions, and hardest yet committing to memory. Personally, I find that these factors contribute to a subtle sense of fatigue that builds as I read.
Prior to starting All Quiet I had never been able to put my finger on exactly why I struggled to read for pleasure for more than a chapter at a time, and had no explicit description of this fatigue, but its absence after finishing the book in a handful of days was note-worthy to me. More importantly, however, the scenes and tone from the novel stuck with me for a while after returning to London, and even at the time was significant enough to convince me not to watch the movie: I felt that the account of the story was complete, even without the Oscar-winning soundtrack.
</br>My motivation for writing this post comes from listening to a recent Lex Friedman podcast with Benjamin Netanyahu wherein the Israeli PM stated a few times he doesn’t read fiction and fails to see the merit in novels when compared to historical or legal texts.
This take is perhaps unsurprising when you consider it as just another in a string of successful people and business leaders shunning fiction. From the years of 2012 to 2020, in his ubiquitous summer reading recommendations, Bill Gates lists just 9 fiction books out of a total of 94.
I’ll admit that for most of my life, I’ve agreed with this sentiment, viewing reading as a means to an end of acquiring tangible skills or building knowledge: read science books to learn about modern technology, economics books for the way the world works, and history for any of your political aspirations as Mr. Netanyahu will gladly tell you. As if concocting a regiment of vitamins and nutritional supplements, hit the right balance of books and you’ll magically become the well-rounded person of your dreams.
For a concrete example of this look no further than Warren Buffet’s compiled list of suggested reading. An even more prolific recommender than Gates, Buffet has assigned some 53 books to investors in annual shareholder letters. Each of these nonfiction texts aims to equip the reader with some practical thesis about business management in the real world, seemingly posing the question: What value then is there to be gained from a fictional prose set in a made-up reality?
Taking a look online, a common argument is that fiction in some way exercises our mental capacity for empathy, and although this might bear some truth, I think that it misses the bigger picture.
At its core, All Quiet is a collection of stories and little else. Although this may sound like an empty statement, the book is actually remarkable in this regard for its purity when compared to other works of fiction. Many authors utilize the format of a journal as a creative device to interlace stories with commentary and reflection in an organic manner. This provides authors with an embedded mouthpiece, in the form of the main character, to speak directly to the reader. This technique is especially prevalent among existentialists who naturally have a lot to say about the subject — e.g. Camus’s The Plague.
With this, profoundly, it becomes apparent that All Quiet is not the war journal of Paul Baumer that you may initially suspect: journals include thoughts and opinions — long sections of text where the writer tries to come to terms with the events we read about; sections of text that are absent from All Quiet.
For this the text is stronger.
By giving the readers space, Remarque trusts us to reflect on the events independently and form our own interpretations. This is why the book is so effective, not only making it more readable by removing the introspective sinew, but also more memorable. Whereas our memory of someone else’s thoughts or emotions may fade, the base stories and our own reflections stick with us, leaving a more permanent impression.
Even in chapter seven where we see Paul return to his hometown on temporary leave, the account remains matter of fact and descriptive rather than turning toward his internal monologue. Away from the constant engagement of the frontline, this is the closest and most intimate we see our protagonist, yet Remarque decides not to fill this with the thoughts of Paul, to tell us about his distress, but to show us.
Through the text, we hear Paul ask for a handkerchief to wipe his tears before seeing his Mother, and we understand how he’s unprepared to be reminded of his responsibilities as a son. We see the food that Paul has brought back for his Mother and sister, and we understand the irony of a soldier providing for his loved ones from the relative abundance of his rations. We feel his Mother’s weak grip on his hand as she asks about the war, and we understand why Paul lies to protect her — to protect himself — knowing but refusing to acknowledge this may be the last time he sees her.
All of this is to say that in his writing, Remarque respects readers enough to detect the undertones and significant themes of the book for themselves. In part this is a stylistic choice, but returning to the discussion earlier, it is the efficacy and simplicity of this method that speaks to a more foundational truth of communication.
All Quiet is a case study on the power of storytelling to convey influential messages, and our bias as humans towards narrative. As hinted at above, remembering things, for most of us, is hard — the process of identifying relevant information and crystalizing it in long-term memory is much easier said than done — and yet there is a very specific, unsuspecting, type of data we are predisposed to digest almost naturally in the shape of stories.
This is illustrated by a common mnemonic device for recalling large strings of data such as names by visualizing a room filled with items serialized to each name. This process structures the data in our memory in a way that can be easily retrieved by mentally walking through the room, compressing otherwise forgettable arbitrary bits of data into a more permanent entity.
None of this is news to the likes of Warren Buffet or Benjamin Netanyahu, I’m sure, with any introduction to business communications course preaching the importance of narrative in your rhetoric, yet the question of actually developing story-telling ability is often glossed-over. In a world centered on minmaxing personal knowledge capital, to me, this is the understated “value” of reading fiction: the best way to improve story-telling is to read well-told stories.
While it is apparent that plot exists outside of fiction, either through news stories or biographies, fictional literature and its authors have the advantage of putting the plot first and foremost to develop the most effective prose, unlike nonfiction which is bound by the limits of circumstance (well… reality).
At this point it’s pertinent to note that All Quiet, like many works of fiction, is based on real events, with Remarque unsurprisingly serving in the Imperial German Army during WWI. In this way, I think it is productive to consider specifically works that augment reality, as it is from comparing these works to their root story that we can better understand the story-telling process. These augmentations give us a look into where the author felt the narrative was hindered by the natural progression of the story, and chooses to develop on the base material.
An obvious consequence of this, then, is the role of honesty and integrity as a story-teller: is this to say that it is okay to lie for the sake of a story? While not applicable in the case of All Quiet which is clearly branded as fiction, this question becomes stickier when considering works “inspired by” real events concerning a real person.
Although examples of this are especially prevalent in cinema, like Sorkin’s The Social Network or Nolan’s Oppenheimer more recently, I want to focus on a more novel medium in the form of comedians’ stand-up routines. Take a watch through any of Dave Chapelle’s specials and it’s apparent to the audience that the stories he is recanting are at least heavily embellished. Despite this, while watching, we are able to suspend our disbelief and laugh as if it were real.
As viewers, we have an understanding with Chapelle that much of what is being said is fiction, and that what’s important in the story is not the specifics but the construction of the joke as a whole. Importantly, this is trickier than it might seem at first, and not a free-pass for lazy writing, since this illusion needs to be balanced: push too far and the story becomes absurd and the joke meaningless. At the same time, purely real events are messy and difficult to condense into simple effective punchlines.
This is the judgment Chapelle makes as an author in deciding when the authenticity of the story is not as important — for the purposes of his work — as the effect of the narrative, and trusts the audience to hold the two separate. We (the audience) do this by realizing the power of the joke outside of the account itself: we laugh because it’s relatable even though it’s never happened to anyone.
For this the final product works better, when done correctly, and we are able to appreciate 1) the skill involved in crafting the story, and 2) the parabolic nature of the fiction.
It is this skill that I feel hasn’t been fully realized by the “knowledge capital” culture mentioned before — think the How to Win Friends and Influence People crowd. Given the appropriate reverence, the merit of reading fiction would become evident, and novels like All Quiet a staple in any personal-potential-maxing book diet: recommended reading for any aspiring person of influence.
