During the war, soldiers became physically stronger (I guess, as long as they didn't get hit) and mentally weaker. During slavery, Frederick Douglass becomes mentally stronger, but physically weaker due to whippings and beatings of every variety and severity. Kantorek convinces his students to join the army, and similarly, slave owners force their slaves to believe that slavery was an unequivocal truth coming directly from God Himself. An assortment of conflicts are present in both All Quiet on the Western Front and The Narrative of Frederick Douglass. The war in which Paul, the protagonist of All Quiet on the Western Front, and his friends are fighting, has survived physically but destroyed mentally. Of course it is a battle with bloodshed and death, and this story is truly tragic; so yes, people die. But there are more minds decaying and dying than there are men. It's as if they "have become a wasteland." This is a conflict between man and himself because, even if there are external factors, man is directly responsible for whether or not death becomes him. For example, Paul wrote poetry and was kind of a “softie.” Although now, after experiencing war, those things don't really matter. He no longer feels any regard or humanity for much of anything. The psyche of men is broken down and destroyed by the fact that death surrounds them. It's as if the battlefield is their graveyard and they are just waiting to die. In Frederick Douglass's fiction, the conflict lies in learning to read and write. Knowledge is the path to freedom and once Douglass could emerge as a literate human being, he would be that much closer to achieving freedom. To become free you have to learn, and he did. After Mrs. Auld, his first teacher, left him, he "was saddened by the thought of losing the help of [his] kind mistress" but was "cheered by the invaluable instruction which, by the simplest accident, [him] had acquired from [his] master." The education he alludes to is knowledge. He heard Mr Auld say that if he became literate, he would become a danger to the white community, thus pushing him to absorb the knowledge of reading. Patriotism is defined as love and devotion to one's country, usually out of personal devotion. Nationalism is an adulterated version of patriotism in which aspirations for national independence in a country under foreign domination are imposed on the people by society or an authoritative figure.