Summary: All Quiet On The Western Front

Remarque’s Remark

Remarque took a gamble in writing a war novel that articulates the truth about the pragmatic images of war: gruesome, and specifically dedicated his book, All Quiet on the Western Front, to World War I and the sheer horror of being on the scopeline of the enemy. Until this novel was published in 1929, the concept of war was highly praised but almost taboo to talk about in a public setting; All Quiet on the Western Front not only uncovered all the dark “secrets” about war but started a revolution of literature, allowing the truth about war to be told. This war novel was written to depict the true images of war, up until this point, everyone talked about war hesitantly in hushed voices as if it was a curse to mention the word “war”. Remarque’s novel was written “simply to tell of a generation of men who…were destroyed by the

World War I was futile, this war started due to a man, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, being murdered, and from that commenced the total consumption of countries’ hatred, and bloody corpses being ruthlessly disfigured by the blind acceptance of defending your country in the midst of a four year-long war. One way that this the book did not hesitate in portraying the gruesomeness of war is by conveying how the soldiers preferred to have an injury that had the potential to send them home than to be in medical care and heal because that meant they would have to go back and fight in the trenches filled with human remains and excrements. The conditions, something that is rarely talked about even to this day, were so horrible in World War I that “a broken arm [was] better than a hole in the guts, and many a man would be thankful enough for such a chance of finding his home way again” showing that these men were completely destroyed mentally because pain is not wanted, but leaving the hell they went through was worth some