"If I were asked what education should give, I would say it should offer breadth of view, ease of understanding, tolerance for others, and a background from which the mind can explore in any direction… Education should provide the tools for a widening and deepening of life, for increased appreciation of all one sees and experiences. It should equip a person to live life well, to understand what is happening about him, for to live life well one must live with awareness." This quote is from Louis L'amour’s autobiography, The Education of a Wandering Man. Out of the pieces of literature read during the English I course, the war novel All Quiet on the Western Front best exemplifies this standard of education. There are various qualities that the book teaches to readers, and they are in no way cliché. Through eyes of a German soldier, an uncommon choice in wartime material, the audience learns what truly occurs on the battlefield. All Quiet on the Western Front also explores the need for intimate relationships. The novel provides an excellent education because presents the horrors of war without bias, offers the alternate point of view of an important point in world history, and describes an increased appreciation for relationships between nature and humans during war.
Remarque vividly describes not only the gore that is present on the battlefield, but the emotional turmoil that wrecks the men in the trenches. Paul Baümer, the narrator, describes his inner thoughts throughout the work, as he would in a journal. His position towards the war gradually changes from anger to despair and depression. Early in the book, the soldiers lose trust in the generation before them, and channel this anger at their fathers and school teacher, Kantor...
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...alize how little is accomplished politically by mass bloodshed. All Quiet on the Western Front also pokes holes into the common stereotype of World War I and II, often leading modern society to the impression that all german soldiers were black hearted and pitted against the allied forces with every bone in their body. Remarque dissolves this with his blunt candor, especially in Paul’s few days with corpse of Gérard Duval the French Printer. Paul soon sees that the two were comrades and could have easily been brothers if it weren’t for the war and their governments. Erich Remarque’s brilliant novel is one that educates the mind of the atrocities of war, and what political leaders often try to hide from their people. The classic work of literature teaches one of the horrors of war from a non-standard point of view, and shows the intimacy of a soldier and nature.
All quiet On the Western Front, a book written by Erich Maria Remarque tells of the harrowing experiences of the First World War as seen through the eyes of a young German soldier. I think that this novel is a classic anti-war novel that provides an extremely realistic portrayal of war. The novel focuses on a group of German soldiers and follows their experiences. Life for the soldiers in the beginning is a dramatic one as they are ordered up to the frontline to wire fences. The frontline makes Paul feel immediately different, as described here. "
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
Erich Maria Remarque’s novel, All Quiet on the Western Front gives you detail and insight into the long, destructive “Great War”. Quickly, romantic illusions about combat are disintegrate. Enthusiastic teenage boys convinced to fight for their country by their patriotic teachers came back feeling part of a lost generation . This novel teaches us what a terrifying and painful experience World War I was for those fighting in the trenches on the front.
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.
Everyone knows what war is. It's a nation taking all of its men, resources, weapons and most of its money and bearing all malignantly towards another nation. War is about death, destruction, disease, loss, pain, suffering and hate. I often think to myself why grown and intelligent individuals cannot resolve matters any better than to take up arms and crawl around, wrestle and fight like animals. In All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque puts all of these aspects of war into a vivid story which tells the horrors of World War 1 through a soldier's eyes. The idea that he conveys most throughout this book is the idea of destruction, the destruction of bodies, minds and innocence.
All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Remarque, is a classic anti-war novel about the personal struggles and experiences encountered by a group of young German soldiers as they fight to survive the horrors of World War One. Remarque demonstrates, through the eyes of Paul Baumer, a young German soldier, how the war destroyed an entire generation of men by making them incapable of reintegrating into society because they could no longer relate to older generations, only to fellow soldiers.
Remarque demonstrates Baumer's disaffiliation from the traditional by emphasizing the language of Baumer's pre- and post-enlistment societies. Baumer either can not, or chooses not to, communicate truthfully with those representatives of his pre-enlistment and innocent days. Further, he is repulsed by the banal and meaningless language that is used by members of that society. As he becomes alienated from his former, traditional, society, Baumer simultaneously is able to communicate effectively only with his military comrades. Since the novel is told from the first person point of view, the reader can see how the words Baumer speaks are at variance with his true feelings. In his preface to the novel, Remarque maintains that "a generation of men ... were destroyed by the war" (Remarque, All Quiet Preface). Indeed, in All Quiet on the Western Front, the meaning of language itself is, to a great extent, destroyed.
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”.
Erich Remarque uses the character Paul Baümer to depict the image of war. All of the knowledge the reader acquires, of war and its effects on the men are through his thoughts and experiences. Due to this first
The title of the poem “July Man”, at first impression seems like it is going to deal with a season or weather. When the reader takes a deeper look into the poem the reader comes to a realization that it has nothing to deal with a season and weather. Instead, the poem talks about the narrator. The reader is able to learn more about the narrator through Margaret Avison’s use of natural imagery/imagery, hyphenated words and the brackets in a few of her stanzas.
While soldiers are often perceived as glorious heroes in romantic literature, this is not always true as the trauma of fighting in war has many detrimental side effects. In Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet On The Western Front, the story of a young German soldier is told as he adapts to the harsh life of a World War I soldier. Fighting along the Western Front, nineteen year old Paul Baumer and his comrades begin to experience some of the hardest things that war has to offer. Paul’s old self gradually begins to deteriorate as he is awakened to the harsh reality of World War 1, depriving him from his childhood, numbing all normal human emotions and distancing the future, reducing the quality of his life. At the age of nineteen, Paul naively enlists in World War 1, blind to the fact he has now taken away his own childhood.
Remarque uses a variety of techniques to display the gruesome affects that war has not only on soldiers but on the nation as a whole. One technique that Remarque uses is imagery. One example that shows the imagery that Remarque displays occurs in chapter six when Paul Baumer talks about what the French do to the German prisoners who carry bayonets that obtain a saw on their blunt edges: "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). Remarque shows how horrible the opposing sides treated one another's prisoners. The details used make one think of how bad the war must be and how it changes one's perception of war. Another example Remarque uses to show the brutality of war is through the imagery of sound. In chapter four Paul talks about the paranoia everyone gets when they hear the loud death cries of the wounded horses at the front: "We can bear almost anything. But now the sweat breaks out on us. We must get up and run no matter where, but where these cries can no linger be heard" (Remarque 63-64). The soldiers at war can handle hearing the bombs and shells going off never ending at the front in a small tight trench, but they cannot bear the cries of the horses and become paranoid.
Remarque accurately portrays all aspects of the war. However Remarque is best able to portray the effects the war has on the soldiers and the rest of the people and the scene of the battlefield compared to home.
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.
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.