In the novel, All Quiet On The Western Front, the author Erich Maria Remarque, uses figurative language and imagery to represent a soldier lifestyle in war. He introduces the main character Paul Bäumer alongside his fellow classmates in German army of World War I. The novel explain from the perspective of one incredibly observant young soldier, Paul Bäumer, who confesses details on the experience of life on the Western Front. This novel is best known for its horror image of trench warfare, and seek to have a determination of war. Through this novel, the author allow us to witness Paul’s perspective as identity, patriotism, morality, and dreams.
Remarque uses personification to compare “Earth” as a way of living in the war. Paul says, “Earth!-Earth!-Earth!” is a portray as a living thing that is confronted and then demolished by bombs and blood. He writes, “To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier” (55). If a
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war were to happen, then there is a certainty that there will be death, For this reason, there will be a meaning to keep surviving and fighting, just to remain the taste of earth or else the afterlife. In times like this, it would seem that the earth itself becomes the higher power that soils the soldiers which keeps them alive. In the Front, Paul gains more experience, therefore he begins to acknowledge war and death more carefully. Loc 2 He looked for the meaning in this world and what surrounds him in a crystal clear view. Pal noticed how he fight with hell on a daily basis. Paul realizes that the earth holds so much power and instead of praying to god for help or protection, he chooses to embrace the situation of earth. In chapter one, Remarque uses Kemmerich’s boot as a symbol to represent that wearing these boots is a sign of death. In addition, Remarque uses imagery to describe the way Müller see Kemmerich’s boot. Müller says “They are fine English boots of soft, yellow leather which reach to the knees and lace up all the way they are things to be covered (16).” This imagery shows that no matter how astonishing the boots may seem, the boots will still have a curse on it. The curse means death. Müller is the first to yearn for them, gazing into the sturdy soles, where Kemmerich dies a sad and suffering death. Having a good pair of boots mean healthier feet, which mean a stronger soldier. This leads to a better soldier that can protect himself against death rather than a soldier with blisters and frostbitten toes. If the boots will allow the soldiers to have the feeling of being stronger and better, then the soldiers would wear it at any cost in the time of war. In chapter seven, Remarque uses simile to compare a habit of being in a front line. Paul says, “But so long as we have to stay here in the field, the front-line days, when they are past, sink down in us like a stone; they are too grievous for us to be able to reflect on them at once (138).” It is a perfect description of having disconnectedness for all the soldiers. He is referring to not think about the negative pathway, instead to cherish every moment of right now in war. For example, the “front line days” where it is a do or die Loc 3 situation in war. Being in the front line, a soldier has to fight to survive to stay on this Earth that represents everything to them. It deals with a sense of loneliness and dislocation from home. Every soldier, deals with having to stay in put like a stone, not moving one bit of step or else one will die in a front line position. In chapter nine, Albert Kropp all of sudden has a wake up call about war, Remarque uses a visual imagery for Kropp theory of war.
Kropp says, “It’s queer, when one thinks about it, we are here to protect our fatherland. And the French are over there to protect their fatherland. Now who’s in the right (203)?” Kropp is asking a sense of “What is love” or at least “What is love for the country we are fighting for?” In a war environment, a solider that loves their country is consider as a patriotic soldier. Kropp is having a sense of patriotism to encourage young men to give their lives to defend the country from the people that recruit these young soldiers. But these young mens, are thrown with words that are manipulating their mind which does not have a postive outcome. Instead, these young mens are protecting each other and not their fatherland. Remarque uses a visual imagery sense of reality of what really goes on in
war.
“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. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another (263).” Powerful changes result from horrifying experiences. Paul Baumer, the protagonists of Erich Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front utters these words signifying the loss of his humanity and the reduction to a numbed creature, devoid of emotion. Paul’s character originates in the novel as a young adult, out for an adventure, and eager to serve his country. He never realizes the terrible pressures that war imposes on soldiers, and at the conclusion of the book the empty shell resembling Paul stands testament to this. Not only does Paul lose himself throughout the course of the war, but he loses each of his 20 classmates who volunteered with him, further emphasizing the terrible consequences of warfare. The heavy psychological demands of life in the trenches and the harsh reality of war strip Paul of his humanity and leave him with a body devoid of all sentiment and feeling.
The young soldiers depicted in Erich Maria Remarque's text All Quiet on the Western Front represent a generation without precedent, constancy, or forethought. The men, answering their elders' calls to become national heroes, have lost their innocence on the battlefield and remain forever altered in belief and spirit. Remarque contrasts the cold realities of war in the present to the tranquility of the past in order to illustrate the psychological transformation of the men stationed on the frontlines. The soldiers appear trapped in the present and alienated from their pasts; however, deconstruction of the text rejects the present and past as opposing states of time and identity, and reveals them as related conditions that are intimately and permanently intertwined.
Stories of wars and the resulting victories are usually told in highly embellished narratives that seek to cover the grim realities of war as much as they aim to whip up popular emotion in order to ensure support for any future wars among the masses. However, war, by its very nature, is neither desirable nor its outcome praiseworthy. Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front lays bare the gritty, gruesome and ultimately self-defeating nature of wars. As Paul Baumer and his soldier comrades enlist and join the Germany Army in order to defeat the enemy, they themselves are slowly vanquished, first psychologically and finally physically through death. As the soldier members Paul Baumer’s company are slowly killed in battle, he becomes more and more disillusioned with the war, especially since he and his friends had enlisted with idealistic aims fed to them by their teacher Kantorek. Instead of patriotic glory and poetic war victories, Paul and his friends found defeat and ephemeral triumphs; instead of honor, they encountered dishonor; instead of personal growth and advancement, they found stagnation and watched their youthful dreams die. Through the war experiences of Paul Baumer as depicted in the novel All Quiet on the Western Front, the ultimate tragedy of war is revealed; it destroys the lives of its very agents – the soldiers – by crashing their dreams and claiming their lives for little discernible overall gain.
In his novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, Remarque depicts a transition in the nature of reality from idealism to realism and naturalism. This transition takes place at different parts of his novel, and to different degrees. At the beginning of the novel, on page 12, we see through Paul B„umer's comments regarding Kantorek that he and his friends were taught in school of the "glory" of war. B„umer stated, ".they taught that duty to one's country is the greatest thing." Since B„umer and his friends respected and trusted Kantorek, they hardly gave the prospect of not going into war a second glance. On pages 84-85, the conversation between B„umer, Mller, and Kropp reveals that practically everything they were taught in school is of no use to them anymore. All of the knowledge they had acquired via their studies was not applicable in the trenches. Instead of having to know, for instance, "How many inhabitants has Melbourne?", they have to know how to light a cigarette in pouring rain. On page 263, Paul comments, "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." This sums up his entire disposition towards himself at the end of the novel. He was taken into the army, willfully, but still taken, in the prime of his youth, to a place where death and destruction were facts of life. Remarque depicts a transition in the value systems of Paul and his comrades.
Remarque uses the contrast between the older generations of soldiers, schoolmasters, and men with higher military rank to convey how the youth at war are more negatively affected. As Barker and Last conclude, “ only the older generation, like Kat, will be able to slip back more or less unscarred into civil life....”(82) Paul argues that the older generation “represented the world of maturity” that was “associated with greater insight and a more humane wisdom.”(Remarque 12-3) However, this ideal in which their elders signified was quickly shattered by the reality of war. Remarque conveys in his book that the older generation had suffered less because the war was a mere “interruption”, the young men, in contrast, “have been gripped by it and do not know what the end maybe. We know only that in some strange and melancholy way we have become a wasteland.” (20)
The novel is based on Erich Maria Remarques experiences with WWI, which gives an insight to all readers of how life is in warfare. With the conflict of Man vs. Man and Man vs. Self, it gives the theme of change in war more amplification. Comradeship gave the men hope and a mini society to live with, enabling everyone to have people to talk to. However, during rough times the dark tone gives the theme of death an extra kick, making all of the elements much more vivid. Erich Maria Remarque’s writing of this novel opens the eyes of readers all around, from going through boot camp, to the final breaths that are
The story of All Quiet On The Western Front centers on a young teenager, Paul Baumer the 19 year old German together with his 4 other classmates is persuaded to volunteer for the German army by enlisting at the beginning of World War I and find themselves fighting in the French warfare. The story is told entirely through the experiences of the young German recruits and highlights the tragedy of war through the eyes of an individual, Paul. Erich Maria Remarque creates the world of the ordinary German soldier in the Great War, spanning around late 1916 to just before the armistice of November 11th, 1918. It is a world of slaughter by gas burning ones lungs, by mortar shells tearing ones body apart, by bayonet and with wounded men caught on barbed wire, as well as hundreds of thousands dying of their wounds in the inadequate field hospitals where ruthless orderlies are in charge.
All Quiet on the Western Front is the retelling of World War One through the eyes of twenty years old, Paul Baumer, a character created by a war veteran himself, Erich Maria Remarque. In this greatest war novel of all time, Remarque displays the emotions that a soldier from the lost generation would have felt. Among one of those emotions was betrayal. Betrayal is very important in understanding this novel, because it gives some answers to why this young generation of soldiers, becomes so lost, and distant. This lost generation could no longer trust that everything their government, parents, or teachers did for them was the right thing; they learned that from so much betrayal.
Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, a novel set in World War I, centers around the changes wrought by the war on one young German soldier. During his time in the war, Remarque's protagonist, Paul Baumer, changes from a rather innocent Romantic to a hardened and somewhat caustic veteran. More importantly, during the course of this metamorphosis, Baumer disaffiliates himself from those societal icons-parents, elders, school, religion-that had been the foundation of his pre-enlistment days. This rejection comes about as a result of Baumer's realization that the pre-enlistment society simply does not understand the reality of the Great War. His new society, then, becomes the Company, his fellow trench soldiers, because that is a group which does understand the truth as Baumer has experienced it.
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.
Erich Maria Remarque’s literary breakthrough, All Quiet on the Western Front, describes two stories. It meticulously chronicles the thoughts of a soldier in World War I while simultaneously detailing the horrors of all wars; each tale is not only a separate experience for the soldier, but is also a new representation of the fighting. The war is seen through the eyes of Paul Baumer whose mindset is far better developed in comparison to his comrades’. His true purpose in the novel is not to serve as a representation of the common soldier, but to take on a godly and omniscient role so that he may serve as the connection between WWI and all past and future melees of the kind. Baumer becomes the representation of all men, and, through him, the reader comes to see the true essence of such a human struggle.
One idea that Remarque uses to de-glamorize the magnificence of war is that in a war, many innocent people die needlessly. In the novel, Paul Baumer, the main character and narrator, states that the war is not fun and heroic at all, but horrific and gruesome. “While [teachers] taught that duty to one’s country is the greatest thing, we already knew that death-throes are stronger.” (Remarque 13) Wars just kill innocent, youthful men and bring nothing but trouble for the country. Men who led their own pleasant life before the war and held nothing against the enemy, died mercilessly just because Chance was not on their side at that particular moment. Franz Kemmerich, a close friend of Paul, has his foot amputated, and pretty soon afterwards, he dies because of an infection in the leg without the foot. Before joining the war, Kemmerich was an ordinar...
Erich Maria Remarque develops this theme by utilizing the symbol of army attire, the motif of separation of powers between different generations, and the motif of lost innocence. Remarque visits the many horrors of wars in the field and in their consciences through powerful symbolism that convey the realities they face, readers can see this through remarks of the characters along the story. Readers observe how the loss of youth scars these men and their ambitions, how soldiers seemingly feel like kids without their attire and the great divide and distrust they hold towards their previous generation. It is in these devices readers can fully grasp the horror and tragedy of
In the course of war, though, he is consumed by it and in the end is "weary, broken, burnt out, rootless, and without hope" (Remarque page #). Through Baümer, Remarque examines how war makes man inhuman. He uses excellent words and phrases to describe crucial details of this theme. "The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts," (page #). Baümer and his classmates who enlisted in the army see the true reality of the war.
Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front is an abstruse proclamation against war, which focuses especially on the destroying effects of war on soldiers’ humanity. Romantic ideals of warfare are under attack throughout Paul’s narration. The novel depicts the detachment between rhetoric about patriotism and honor and the real horror of trench warfare (Julie Gilbert, 1995). The author constantly underlines that the soldiers do not fight for hypothetical believes of patriotic spirit; they fight to survive. They are busy with looking for shelter, food, and clothing. They do their best to avoid gunfire and bombs. Nothing makes the true experience of war look fair in this novel. Even the friendship between Paul and his fellow soldiers