Juxtaposition In All Quiet On The Western Front

Both Remarque and Hemingway use the technique of juxtaposition to demonstrate the meaningless nature of patriotic idealism in the face of war. In ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ Paul Bäumer and his classmates enlist into the army under the nationalistic ideology that all citizens should give unquestioning loyalty to the state, as represented by Kantorek’s persuasive preaching in which he asks “You’ll all go, won’t you lads?”1. However, when Kantorek writes his former pupils a patriotic letter, the men begin to realise that they despise him for sending them to die for empty ideals. By using the phrase “young men of iron”2 he implies that the men are young however, they feel that the horror of war has aged them prematurely, beyond their nineteen

In his novel, Hemingway characterises his main protagonist, Frederic Henry, as having a very stoic and indifferent attitude towards the war, when he claims that the war does “not have anything to do with me”3. When asked why he joined the war, Henry replies, “I was in Italy…and I spoke Italian”4, which reveals that he did not have a strong belief in its cause, nor was he pursuing glory. Hemingway juxtaposes Henry’s highly unpatriotic attitude with the young patriot, Gino. On the ruined Bainsizza, the two have a conversation in which Gino expresses his belief that his homeland is sacred and he conveys his patriotic pride in protecting it. In contrast, Henry is “embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain”5. Hemingway has set up this contrast in order to exaggerate his dismissal of the romanticized military hero. Like Remarque, he prefers instead to discuss war honestly with “the concrete names of villages,... names of rivers, and the numbers of

Throughout his novel, Hemingway uses the recurring symbol of rain to illustrate this notion. Rain is typically associated with life and growth, however he uses rain as a symbol of death. From the very first chapter, when rain is the cause of the death of 7,000 soldiers due to an outbreak of cholera, to the last sentence when Henry “walked back to the hotel in the rain”7 after his sweetheart, Catherine Barkley, dies during childbirth, the reader is reminded that tragedy during wartime is as unstoppable as rain. Hemingway accompanies this symbol with the use of a very grim and abrupt writing style, where he eliminates all unnecessary words. When describing the death of the men due to the outbreak of cholera, Hemingway simply states that “it was checked”8 and that “in the end only seven thousand died of it in the army”9. This reveals how the death of a seemingly large number of men was an insignificant event overall, thus accentuating the meaningless nature of human life during war. Likewise, Remarque uses a similar style when Paul mentions in an offhand manner, that half of his company was killed during a particular battle. Instead of mourning the death of their comrades, the remaining men instead contemplate the possibility of obtaining extra food and rations. Similarly, when Paul ultimately dies at the conclusion of the novel, the army simply states that