The Effect Of Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet On The Western Front

"This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war" (Remarque 1). The author of this book, Erich Maria Remarque discusses the reality of war and the detrimental affects it holds on our hard working soldiers. During the war era, survival comes first followed by comfort. Erich does an excellent job in showing the context and severe brutality used in the war front accompanied with the violence and terror used. A main purpose as to why Remarque created this writing was for readers to understand the journey and

Paul is on a journey to become a man, and has Kat, an older soldier who mentors him through his hardships and war zone efforts. Early in the novel, in chapter one, Paul arrives back from the trenches and is surprised to having double rations delivered to him and thoroughly relinquishes and savors the food, but fails to realize that the double portions were given due to the high number of casualties resulted from the war. The author gives a strong viewpoint in that war is a gruesome and devastation task to endure and that nations should avoid it at all costs. Erich uses a wide variety of techniques to represent the cruelty that war brings upon our generation. An example of this is through imagery, and is shown in chapter six where Paul talks about the French harming German soldiers, “Some of our men were found whose noses were cut off and their eyes poked out with their own saw bayonets. Their mouths and noses were stuffed with sawdust so that they suffocated" (Remarque 103). This level of imagery can provide deep insight on the severity and sufferings that soldiers inhibited. The author provides the imagery of sound as well in chapter four, where Paul discusses the anxiety and paranoia the soldiers obtain when the high decibel noises come from the horses seeking medical treatment, “We can bear almost anything. But now

The author states that, “The first bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces” (Remarque 13). Paul Baumer blames the past politicians and generations for creating the war. He also discusses the lost generation and how none of Paul’s friends will return back home with patriotic joy. War never becomes a happy ending. In the last chapter of the novel, Paul is on his own, and has no living friend with him and questions his identity, but at the very end of the book, it says that Baumer’s body was found laying dead on a rather quiet and peculiar day in October 1918 and, “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” (Remarque