Analysis Of Erich Remarque's All Quiet On The Western Front

In Erich Remarque’s tragic novel, All Quiet On The Western Front, he depicts the hardships war has on an individual, especially the younger generation. From these hardships, the audience understands why the individual is not able to find a way to reconnect with his past life. Paul’s war experience destroys his empathy, as well as his connection to others and the society that he once was a part of. The impact of the war stripped Paul of his humane connections between him and his society, and in the end a naive teen had to endure bloodshed. Paul and his comrades had no idea what the war would do to them and sadly learned that the war was more a misfortune than an honor. Paul and his friends were eaten out, mentally, by the war and remained casings of their old lives. Further exemplifying their inability to reconnect to their past lives and in turn the normal world. Remarque creates Paul Baumer to represent a generation of men who are know to the outside

The novel ends with, “ e fell in October, 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole Front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front” (140). Meaning that Paul died on a quiet day, a day when there wasn 't much action elsewhere on the Front. By the end of Remarque’s novel, the audience has seen the infernal assaults Paul has managed to survive, the fact that paul dies on a relatively peaceful day suggests that he was either comfortable with death, expecting it, or that he was so used to the violence he didn’t know what to do when it became quiet. The “expression of calm” that he died with leaves the audience knowing that he has found his peace. The impact the audience would have been shocked to see was that the war was so horrible that after all this fighting to stay alive, Paul was so relieved to die. He left the earth surrounded by the horrific acts of the war but still managed to find his