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The Cruel Realities Of War In All Quiet On The Western Front

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The Cruel Realities of War
In war, is there anything honorable about violence, murder, and cruelty? After becoming a soldier and being exposed to the cold realities of war, Paul Bäumer, a 20-year-old, realizes that the government has lied to the soldiers; they told them that it is an honor to fight for their country. The theme of the anti-war novel “All Quiet on The Western Front” is that war changes you for the worse. Remarque conveys to the readers that it is not an honor to fight for your country through the use of irony, symbolism, and imagery.
War causes all soldiers to eventually become indifferent. When Paul is explaining the process of being a soldier, he says, “At first astonished, then embittered, and finally indifferent” (Remarque …show more content…

When Paul was talking about how the war has affected everyone, he says, “We know that in some strange and melancholy way, we have become a waste land” (Remarque 20). A waste land is a “land where nothing can grow or be built” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary). In this novel, the waste land symbolizes the deprivation of growth in Paul and the other soldiers. They can no longer grow because war has changed them for the worse. It has scarred and traumatized them, enough that even if they wanted to grow, they couldn’t be able to–like a waste land.
Paul and his comrades have to fight in a war where death is no longer something that is dreaded, but an escape–something that can rid them of the suffering(reality) that war has brought upon them, thus proving that fighting in war is not an honor. Near the end of the novel, when Kat is injured, Paul says, “I bind his wound; his shin seems to be smashed. It has got the bone, and Kat groans desperately: ‘At last––just at the last––‘” (Remarque 287). Kat gets a life-threatening injury to the head while fighting; Paul thinks that he just has a leg injury, Kat knows this but he doesn’t want to tell Paul because he wants to escape war through death. War is so horrible that soldiers would rather die than continue

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