All Quiet On The Western Front Analysis Essay

Chris Mages

Mrs. Robertson

20-2-18

All Quiet on the Western Front Analysis Essay

The Horrors of War

The horrors a soldier experiences on the frontlines is the stuff of make believe made real. There are certain novels that attempt to spread a message about these nightmares. The novel All Quiet on the Western Front is a story that follows a German soldier named Baumer, as he tries to survive the horrors of the western front. In the novel All Quiet on the Western Front Remarque expresses the important theme, that war contains a horrible level of brutality that no person should ever have to endure.

The theme, the brutality of war, is a very important message that Remarque tries to send to readers. It means that war is a horrific event that occurs, causing a massive loss of human life, while achieving nothing. More specifically, the theme means that people who experience war firsthand also experience a severe level of ruthlessness that some wouldn’t think possible. After being on the front for such a long time, Baumer explains that “war is the cause of death like cancer and tuberculosis, like influenza and dysentery. The deaths are merely more frequent, more varied and terrible” (Remarque 271). This quote perfectly describes the horrors of war which the source of is the extreme ferocity. Massive amounts of life that

could do something incredible are lost. All this due to a barbaric pointless war.
` The savageness of this conflict doesn’t just cause deaths.

Remarque tries to point out that it also destroys the lives of those who survive the war by breaking their mental state, giving them PTSD. This becomes very apparent in Baumer when he states that “I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow” (Remarque 263). Even if he survives the war, he will never be the same. The astoundingly cruel war turns him into a soulless husk of a man. So even if the war didn’t kill them directly, its brutality permanently changes all those who experience it for the

worse.
The harsh barbarity of war, as Remarque explains, doesn’t just have to do with massive amounts of death or mentally breaking those who survive. This theme also entails the loss of a future of all those who enlist. If someone enlists or is forcefully put into the army, their future is immediately gone. Baumer shows this with his explanation that “We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war” (Remarque 88). So, the war doesn’t just take lives but it also takes away the futures of all those who are in it. Therefore, the theme doesn’t just mean the loss of life is appalling, it also means that the loss of hope and a bright future is just as horrible.
The Most important theme of this novel is that the atrocities of war are immense, diverse, and much worse than what any person should endure. War causes massive loss of life, mentally devastates those who survive, and takes away the future of everyone who participates in this horrendous event. The terror and brutality of war is an important message to spread, for those who live through it, go through a living nightmare.