All Quiet On The Western Front Remarque Analysis

Throughout For Whom the Bell Tolls and All Quiet on the Western Front, the novelists Ernest Hemingway and Erich Remarque establish the destructive and enduring impacts of war, and portray the catastrophic and permanent consequences for individuals and families. Both texts convey these impacts and horrors of war through symbolism, contrast, characterisation, imagery and writing style. Hemingway and Remarque reveal the destructive legacy of war, which extends far beyond deceased soldiers and the generation that survived the physical and psychological trauma. The authors achieve this through contrasting representations, with Hemingway’s view of the euphemistic ‘victory’ of the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, as opposed to Remarque’s

Hemingway and Remarque employ symbolism in different ways, whether it be to induce a sense of patriotism or to highlight the transformative nature of war. In portraying the transfiguration caused by war, Remarque uses the symbol of the boots of his dying character, Franz Kemmerich, which are taken successively by surviving soldiers as more of their comrades die. Members of the German squad contest possession of the boots, as they “would […] go bare-foot over barbed wire […] to get them”. In contrast to Hemingway who employs symbolism to present the disastrous impact of war in a gentler way, Remarque brutally reveals the ruinous effects of war, and the selfish desperation that changes soldiers into the antithesis of their previous selves while living in constant despair and danger. As each consecutive soldier extracts the boots from his friend’s lifeless body, Remarque shows that war has caused the soldiers to “have lost all feeling for one another. [They] can hardly control [themselves]”. The reader comes to understand the horrors of war as the author depicts the young soldiers living in appalling conditions, including filthy, waterlogged ditches full of rats and decaying corpses. They adopt primal