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All quiet on the western front critiques
Mental and physical effects of war
All quiet on the western front critical essay
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The Lost Generation From sunrise to sunset, day after day, war demolishes men, cities, and hope. War has an effect on soldiers like nothing else, and sticks with them for life. The damage to a generation of men on both sides of the war was inestimable. Both the novel All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, and the poem “I Have a Rendezvous with Death,” by Alan Seeger, demonstrate the theme of a lost generation of men, mentally and physically, in war through diction, repetition, and personification. Diction is strongly used in both the novel and the poem to manipulate the thoughts of the reader and to stir up emotions. The poem makes an almost undecipherable, literal tone within the sound of the rhyme scheme, also creating calm peace with a mostly unpleasant situation. An example is the reoccurring line, “I have a rendezvous with Death” (Seeger 1, 5, 11, 20). The word “rendezvous” is a nice word where a person would meet somebody out of free will, even like to two lovers seeing each other. Differently, death is the unknown for many humans to fear. The narrator has arranged to meet with an experience known as death. The narrator would only take such actions if he had reason to believe it was not as fearful an action to take as so many believe. The repetition of this line keeps this idea fresh in his audience’s mind. Similarly, in All Quiet on the Western Front, Remarque uses word like forgotten and misunderstood to describe the way that outsiders think of the soldiers participating in the war. The way Baumer states: “And men will not understand us—for the generation that grew up before us, though it has passed these years with us already had a home and a calling; now it will return to its old occupations, and the... ... middle of paper ... ...nds of his enemy. Unlike the speaker in Seeger’s poem, Paul accepts the fact that he has no control over his life when in the middle of a bombardment. War deprives soldiers of so much that there is nothing more to take. No longer afraid, they give up inside waiting for the peace that will come with death. War not only takes adolescence, but plasters life with images of death and destruction. Seeger and Remarque demonstrate the theme of a lost generation of men in war through diction, repetition, and personification to relate to their readers that though inevitable and unpredictable, death is not something to be feared, but to calmly be accepted and perhaps anticipated. The men who fight in wars are cast out from society, due to a misunderstanding of the impact of such a dark experience in the formative years of a man’s life, thus being known as the lost generation.
In the history of modern western civilization, there have been few incidents of war, famine, and other calamities that severely affected the modern European society. The First World War was one such incident which served as a reflection of modern European society in its industrial age, altering mankind’s perception of war into catastrophic levels of carnage and violence. As a transition to modern warfare, the experiences of the Great War were entirely new and unfamiliar. In this anomalous environment, a range of first hand accounts have emerged, detailing the events and experiences of the authors. For instance, both the works of Ernst Junger and Erich Maria Remarque emphasize the frightening and inhumane nature of war to some degree – more explicit in Jünger’s than in Remarque’s – but the sense of glorification, heroism, and nationalism in Jünger’s The Storm of Steel is absent in Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. Instead, they are replaced by psychological damage caused by the war – the internalization of loss and pain, coupled with a sense of helplessness and disconnectedness with the past and the future. As such, the accounts of Jünger and Remarque reveal the similar experiences of extreme violence and danger of World War I shared by soldiers but draw from their experiences differing ideologies and perception of war.
All Quiet on the Western Front is a powerful novel that communicates many messages concerning war’s hidden horrors and gives insight into the unique experiences of soldiers. Remarque uses a wide array of language techniques and writing concepts to expose readers to truth of the simultaneously corrupt yet complex affair that is war. It is an important, genuine novel – the type that needs to exist to end dreadful human affairs, such as
Through these brutal and traumatic scenes, the novel presents several themes, one of which is “Loss of Youth.” These young soldiers endure a lot, pai...
He arrives back at his town, unused to the total absence of shells. He wonders how the populations can live such civil lives when there are such horrors occurring at the front. Sitting in his room, he attempts to recapture his innocence of youth preceding the war. But he is now of a lost generation, he has been estranged from his previous life and war is now the only thing he can believe in. It has ruined him in an irreversible way and has displayed a side of life which causes a childhood to vanish alongside any ambitions subsequent to the war in a civil life. They entered the war as mere children, yet they rapidly become adults. The only ideas as an adult they know are those of war. They have not experienced adulthood before so they cannot imagine what it will be lie when they return. His incompatibility is shown immediately after he arrives at the station of his home town. ”On the platform I look round; I know no one among all the people hurrying to and fro. A red-cross sister offers me something to drink. I turn away, she smiles at me too foolishly, so obsessed with her own importance: "Just look, I am giving a soldier coffee!"—She calls me "Comrade," but I will have none of it.” He is now aware of what she is
The poet Wilfred Owen was one of many poets who were against war. He reflected this idea of anti-war in his poems, one of his poems called “Anthem for Doomed Youth”, mirrors most aspects of war all put together in this short still deep poem. An example of that would be when the speaker stated,” What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?”(1) The speaker asks is there any sound that marks our soldier’s death other than the sounds of church bell’s which are mostly rung to represent somebody’s absence? Clearly, the speaker sets anger as the tone of the poem through this question to show that soldier’s death is unremarkable.. The speaker compares the soldiers to a “cattle” which illustrates that soldiers are treated more like animals with no feelings and also shows how they are killed indiscriminately in war. Finally the line ironically contains an iambic pentameter which is a natural rhythm for such dark, grim, dull subject. The two novels, The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane, and All Quiet on The Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, both present a similar idea of how soldiers are killed out there in the front comprehensively and the dehumanization of war towards its soldiers. The first novel is set during the Civil War, and it focuses on the psychological aspects of one soldier named Henry Fleming and how his naive thoughts about war constantly change through the course of the novel. The second novel presents the life of a soldier named Paul Baumer and his friends who were faced with the terribleness of war and how severely it affected their lives. The Red badge of Courage and All Quiet on The Western Front are similar in the way of how the main characters develop through the novel to change from naïve and innocent men ...
The Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger once said “Perjor est bello timor ipse belli”, which translates to: “the dread of war is worse than war itself”. With this quote, Seneca identifies that war has both its physical and mental tolls on its participants. The psychological and emotional scars of war do much more damage to a solider than the actual physical battles. Tim O’ Brien repeats this idea many years later in his novel “The Things They Carried”, by describing how emotional burdens outweigh the physical loads that those in war must endure. What keeps them alive is the hope that they may one day return home to their loved ones. Yet, the weight of these intangible “items” such as “grief, terror, love, longing” overshadow the physical load they must endure since they are not easily cast away.
In the novel All Quiet on the Western Front, Paul, the main character is a nineteen-year-old man who voluntarily joins the German army to fight in World War I against the French. Paul went into the war full of nationalism and ready to fight for his country. Soon after entering training, Paul began to realize that there is way more to war than just fighting for his country. Because it contains evidence of dehumanization and disconnectedness with the world, Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front reveals soldiers who are blindsided by the effects war has on them.
After an event of large magnitude, it still began to take its toll on the protagonist as they often “carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die” during the war (O’Brien 1187). The travesties that occurred with the brutality of war did not subside and began to affect those involved in a deeply emotional way. The multitude of disastrous happenings influenced the narrator to develop a psychological handicap to death by being “afraid of dying” although being “even more afraid to show it” (O’Brien 1187). The burden caused by the war creates fear inside the protagonist’s mind, yet if he were to display his sense of distress it would cause a deeper fear for those around him, thus making the thought of exposing the fear even more frightening. The emotional battle taking place in the psyche of the narrator is directly repressed by the war.
Warfare is a dreadful and horrifying experience that shows the violent side of humanity. War is the worst thing a human being can go through. The recruits suffer inevitable damage by the ordeals they encounter and the ruff experiences they take part in. War changes a person, from a nice boy into a stone-cold killing machine. Erich Maria Remarque, the expressive German author, shows the scenes of war in his novel All Quiet on the Western Front. In the novel, Paul Bäumer, the protagonist, journeys to war, like his fellow classmates from high school, and fights for his country. He watches slowly as each one of his friends die until he is the only one left. At the end, Paul dies on the front treating death as a friend; he is "glad the end has come" (296). Paul experiences the horror of war through the rough training, the murderous front, and the reoccurring flashbacks.
In “Vigil”, a man is lying by another dying man’s side and describing the appalling sights he senses. While he is pinned down “facing the full moon / his bloated hands / permeating / my silence /”, the narrator feels has has never “been / so / attached to life” (Ungaretti 7-10, 12-14). This is extremely disturbing as when one feels closer to life ‘s system as a whole, it means they are ready to take drastic measures to either forget, or undo the experience. Nevertheless, the situation is no less frightful in All Quiet on the Western Front. The imagery Erich Maria Remarque provides is extremely haunting, as it is an accurate representation of the horrors seen at war. When Paul Baumer sees people lying dead, he says “Their sharp, downy, dead faces have the awful expressionlessness of dead children” (Remarque 130). Baumer can envision the expression of dead children without seeing them, and relate them to what he is currently experiencing, which is a true indication of a sense uncontrollable by human
Imagine being in an ongoing battle where friends and others are dying. All that is heard are bullets being shot, it smells like gas is near, and hearts race as the times goes by. This is similar to what war is like. In the novel All Quiet on the Western Front, the narrator, Paul Baumer, and his friends encounter the ideals of suffering, death, pain, and despair. There is a huge change in these men; at the beginning of the novel they are enthusiastic about going into the war. After they see what war is really like, they do not feel the same way about it. During the war the men experience many feelings especially the loss of loved ones. These feelings are shown through their first experience at training camp, during the actual battles, and in the hospital.
Throughout All Quiet on the Western Front, Paul Baumer undergoes drastic changes as he realizes the full extent in which the war has changed his life. Paul starts out the book as a veteran, yet he is never the less changed by the war that shook the world. Paul realizes the full extent of his transformation when he is forced to kill a Frenchman just because the Frenchman tried to find shelter. Paul Baumer changed by a subject too messy to be discussed in proper decorum. T.S. Matthews says, “This is a book about something that nobody likes to talk of too much. It is about what happens to men in war. It has nothing whatever to do with the politeness, the nobilities, or any of the sometimes pretty and sometimes ridiculous notions to which the world has once again settled down (130).” Paul is changed by a war directed by people who had no idea of the horrors that would change the men of their country. Paul lived in brotherhood and died in anonymity. His life wasted by a political war, and uncaring generals. Only by accepting his transformation can Paul be at peace with his life and live in peace in death.
The three narratives “Home Soil” by Irene Zabytko, “Song of Napalm” by Bruce Weigl, and “Dulce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen all have the same feelings of war and memory, although not everyone experiences the same war. Zabytko, Weigl, and Owen used shifting beats, dramatic descriptions, and intense, painful images, to convince us that the horror of war far outweighs the devoted awareness of those who fantasize war and the memories that support it.
Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front is a novel that takes you through the life of a soldier in World War I. Remarque is accurately able to portray the episodes soldiers go through. All Quiet on the Western Front shows the change in attitudes of the men before and during the war. This novel is able to show the great change war has evolved to be. From lining your men up and charging in the eighteenth century, to digging and “living” in the trenches with rapid-fire machine guns, bombs, and flame-throwers being exposed in your trench a short five meters away. Remarque makes one actually feel the fun and then the tragedy of warfare. At the beginning of the novel Remarque gives you nationalist feelings through pride of Paul and the rest of the boys. However at the end of the war Remarque shows how pointless war really is. This is felt when everyone starts to die as the war progresses.
Throughout their lives, people must deal with the horrific and violent side of humanity. The side of humanity is shown through the act of war. This is shown in Erich Remarque’s novel, “All Quiet on the Western Front”. War is by far the most horrible thing that the human race has to go through. The participants in the war suffer irreversible damage by the atrocities they witness and the things they go through.