All Quiet On The Western Front By Erich Maria Remarque

The Struggles of a Soldier The brutalities of war are shown through a soldiers experience through a war. In the book All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque tells the story of a group of friends in World War 1. Remarque uses the protagonist, Paul, to display the brutalities of war by experiencing some of them himself. Brutalities of war are expressed through Paul’s experience of the war harming soldiers by negatively impacting their physical bodies, making it hard for soldiers to reintegrate themselves into society and, damaging their psychological health.
In the beginning of the book, Remarque displays a brutality of war, negative physical impacts, when Paul and his friends get something to eat. There is more food than to be

Paul is an example of this because when he returns to his hometown, he feels disconnected when he tries to regain his innocence. Paul describes this emotion with the statement “A terrible feeling of foreignness suddenly rises up in me. I cannot find my way back, I am shut out through I entreat earnestly and put forth my strengths” (172) When Paul returns to his home, he doesn’t have a background to hold on to anymore. All he has now is his gun and his image as a soldier. Another reason why it is difficult for a soldier to reintegrate into society is because of all the stress and trouble it brings. Paul describes when he questions his leave with the statement “What is a leave?-A pause that only makes everything after it worse. When Paul is home, he cannot stop thinking about his friends who are still fighting on the front. He is worried whether they will survive or not. Near the end of his leave, he regrets ever taking the leave in the first place. He sees that with his leave, all he brought was a great pain to his mother, who had cancer did not want him to

Paul and his comrades are examples of this because he explains that they have become “…wild beasts… No longer do we lie helpless, waiting on the scaffold, we can destroy and kill, to save ourselves, to save ourselves and be revenged” (113). The knowledge that they could die at any given moment has impacted their thought process, forcing them to stray away from reason and reside with primal senses. This also contributes to the mental disorder PTSD because since the soldiers have reverted to “wild beasts” during the war, it will be hard to get their mindsets to revert to what it was before they went into a traumatic war. Another way where a soldier’s mindset could be negatively impacted is when they kill an enemy in which they know the enemy’s background. This is displayed when Paul kills a French man, Gerard Duval, who jumps into the same pit as him. Paul fails to kill the soldier immediately and sees his face. Paul chooses to help the man pass with less pain than kill him. Paul explains his reason with “If only I had not lost my revolver while crawling about, I would shoot him, Stab him I cannot” (220-221). After the Frenchman dies Paul learns about his background, how he has a wife and a kid. Paul’s thought processes begins to worsen and his thoughts get a little out of hand, making him go slightly insane. He makes promises to the dead man, promises such as writing