As the narrator and the protagonist of the story, young Paul Bäumer goes through changes as the story progresses. He was encouraged to join the war by his schoolteacher, and when he eventually faced the war directly himself, all he had learned from his school proved useless. Experience was what was valued on the battlefield of war. The brutality had certainly taken an impact on him. Before the war, Paul had compassion and held innocence. In spite of the fact that due to the horrors of war, it had destroyed his former interests and compassion for writing. In the novel, Paul stated that the camaraderie was what prevented him from going insane. After all, he had been cut off from the past by refusing to get too close to his dying mother, and he saw no future in his life anymore. A soldier's plight was to be pulled into war and that's how Paul, realizing that his enemies were just like him, changed. He had to change, or he would have gone insane. It was what wars did to soldiers, even to young ones like him.
In the beginning of the novel, Paul held several amorous beliefs of war. At school, he was taught that war was fought for the country, for patriotism and for nationalism. He believed that he was doing a great and noble thing by serving for his country when he went to war by joining the German side. Although, once Paul went to war and experienced the horrors and encountering deaths first-hand, his notions were forced to change. He grew out of his innocence when he had to experience losing friends to the war. Gradually, two years into the war, when he turned twenty-years-old, he had to detach from his sensitive and kind side. He had to learn how to survive. He had to learn how to deal with friends dying in pain in front of him. He had to deal to learn to deal with constant grief he had to encounter every day up in the front lines.
