Through the novel All Quiet on the Western Front, novelist Erich Maria Remarque provides a commentary on the dehumanizing tendencies of warfare. Remarque continuously references the soldiers at war losing all sense of humanity. The soldiers enter the war levelheaded, but upon reaching the front, their mentality changes drastically: “[they] march up, moody or good tempered soldiers – [they] reach the zone where the front begins and become on the instant human animals” (Remarque 56). This animal instinct is essential to their survival. When in warfare, the soldiers’ minds must adapt to the environment and begin to think of the enemy as objects rather than human beings. It is this defensive mechanism that allows the soldiers to save themselves from the feeling of guilt, yet also desensitizes them and causes the loss of humanity. At one point, Paul states “we have become wild beasts. We do not fight, we defend ourselves against annihilation…No longer do we lie helpless, waiting on the scaffold, we can destroy and kill, to save ourselves, to save ourselves and be revenged” (Remarque 113). All Quiet on the Western Front admonishes both the horrors of combat and its dehumanizing tendencies by showing soldiers, regurgitated by the machine that is war, turned into animate objects incapable of emotion.
One method that Remarque employs to convey the dehumanization of soldiers during war occurs in the constant, remorseless killing throughout the novel. This brutal murder demonstrates that the soldiers have lost all emotion they may have previously had. On the front, the men must be emotionless: they cannot have sorrow for the fallen, or feel for the ones they killed. The soldiers in the novel see grotesque and inappropriate images not seen ...
... middle of paper ...
...n the face of war. Similarly to “Dulce et Decorum Est,” “The Sentry” has a highly descriptive tone. The images of “deluging muck” (Sentry 15) and “wretches… [bleeding] and spew[ing]” (Sentry 28) are so graphic that the audience feels as if they are on the battlefield with the soldier. This, along with the abundant literary devices and poem structure, decisively reaffirm the concept, also in All Quiet On the Western Front and “Dulce et decorum est,” that war, despite its regal façade, is dehumanizing.
Works Cited
Owen, Wilfred. “Dulce Et Decorum Est.” Poetry X. Ed. Jough Dempsey. 9 Sep 2003. 10 Feb. 2014 .
Owen, Wilfred. “The Sentry.” Poetry X. Ed. Jough Dempsey. 9 Sep 2003. 10 Feb. 2014 .
Remarque, Erich Maria. All Quiet on the Western Front, Ballantine Books, New York, NY. 1982.
In Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, characters such as Paul and his friends become indifferent to shocking elements of war through constant exposure to them. For example, the characters are unconcerned about the dangers of the front because they are accustomed to being on the front. In another instance, Paul’s friends show no emotions when they witness snipers killing enemy soldiers. Also, Kat finds the unusual effects of mortar shells amusing. These examples prove that through war, characters of the book have become indifferent to things that they would normally find shocking.
“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.
To Pursue Remarque’s tone farther, his tone throughout this novel was rather easy to find because of the horrific, depressing, yet at the same time a little sympathetic, scenes. Paul explains a scene after a bombardment, “In the branches dead men are hanging. A naked soldier is squatting in the fork of a tree, he still has his helmet on, otherwise he is entirely unclad. There is only half of him sitting up there, the top half, the legs are missing” (93). The bombs are killing several men at a time. Paul not only observes this in real life, he ultimately has to live through it. Once a war has been going on for a long period, the soldiers know that war is all about death.
In Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Paul Baumer, a German soldier, along with his comrades, suffer through traumatic events and devastating losses as they struggle to survive the violent maelstrom of the Great War. As they fight, the grave circumstances and decimated landscapes they witness has a haunting effect on them. In order to cope with this drastic setting, they resort to dehumanization. By seeing their enemies as less than human, the war conditions them to kill, relying solely on instinct alone. They distance themselves from their comrades by dehumanizing them, making it easier to cope with their deaths. To maintain their sanity and face the horrors of the war, Paul and his company must suppress their humanity.
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.
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.
As war wages on, the German youth continuously fight forces beyond their control leading the young soldiers to dehumanization. Remarque indicates that patriotism is a thought of the past as the young newcomers are exposed to the authenticity of trench warfare. In the beginning of the novel the German recruits experience some inhumane training in the trenches running along the Rhineland, and thus quickly learn that surviving or dying has hardly anything to do with their toughness (Napierkowski 6). This realization materializes as the young Germans start fighting fresh, well-equipped Allies troops. Not only are the Allies troops fresh and well-equipped, but they outnumber the German troops in quantity and devastating equipment. The Allies list of destructive equipment includes: tanks, airplanes, poison gas, bombs and machine guns. The Allies technology only make survival for the German troops only more difficult as the trenches offer ...
The stereotypical stance of Corporal Himmelstoss, a military officer, is presented as a physically undersized man who wears a waxed moustache, which ideally supports the many defiant occasions where he disheartens the young soldiers. Throughout the novel where he is sent into the trenches we accept his role of breaking the spirits of the young soldiers. However, we understand why Paul and Albert Kropp take revenge beating him up. It is through these instances where the reader can almost understand a character through his right and wrong actions. Remarque’s inclusion of such scenes in the novel acts out the bitter anger and disillusionment of the young soldiers.
Erich Maria Remarque's classic war novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, deals with the many ways in which World War I affected people's lives, both the lives of soldiers on the front lines and the lives of people on the homefront. One of the most profound effects the war had was the way it made the soldiers see human life. Constant killing and death became a part of a soldier's daily life, and soldiers fighting on all sides of the war became accustomed to it. The atrocities and frequent deaths that the soldiers dealt with desensitized them to the reality of the vast quantities of people dying daily. The title character of the novel, Paul Bäumer, and his friends experience the devaluation of human life firsthand, and from these experiences they become stronger and learn to live as if every day were their last.
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.
Owen, Wilfred. “Dulce Et Decorum Est.” World War I British Poets. Ed. Candace Ward. Dover Publications, Inc; New York, 1997.
Many of Remarque’s ideas expressed in All Quiet on the Western Front were not completely new. Remarque emphasized things that portrayed the magnitude of issues soldiers face, and how the physical body and senses affects their emotional well-being. The ideas in All Quiet in the Western Front of not knowing the difference between sleep and death, seeing gruesome sights of people, and frustration towards people who cannot sympathize with soldiers, are also shown in Siegfried Sassoon’s “The Dug-Out”, Giuseppe Ungaretti’s “Vigil”, and Sassoon's’ “Suicide in the Trenches”.
Remarque also tried to teach his audience. Written within a decade of the end of the war, the book calls on those who forfeited their youth to the war not to allow time to hide what had happened. Time may heal all wounds, but the cause of those wounds must not be forgotten, nor allowed to repeat itself. The author is; however, pragmatic enough to realize that all will not learn the lesson; nevertheless, those who are willing to learn it will discover that the story has been told before, and without their intervention, it is doomed to be told again.
Remarque displays the brutal effect war has on people’s minds. Paul Baumer suffers from several psychological disorders that the war
Wilfred Owen’s poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” makes the reader acutely aware of the impact of war. The speaker’s experiences with war are vivid and terrible. Through the themes of the poem, his language choices, and contrasting the pleasant title preceding the disturbing content of the poem, he brings attention to his views on war while during the midst of one himself. Owen uses symbolism in form and language to illustrate the horrors the speaker and his comrades go through; and the way he describes the soldiers, as though they are distorted and damaged, parallels how the speaker’s mind is violated and haunted by war.