Preview

Analysis: All Quiet On The Western Front

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
114 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Analysis: All Quiet On The Western Front
Contrary to other literary history works, “All Quiet on the Western Front” by Remarque Erich Maria is so unique because of the way it displays such a realistic view of war and the associated loss of humanity, innocence, and emotion that accompany it. Throughout this novel, Remarque proves his point that war is unnecessary, and dishonorable. The novel really emphasizes on the accumulating body count everyday, showing every aspect of how war is absolutely gruesome and such a waste of pure lives. Also, “All Quiet on the Western Front” shows how the position of being in war can change a person dramatically preventing them from returning to their previous lives, and scarring them permanently.

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    ‘All Quiet on the Western Front”, written by Erich Remarque was a book written in the perspective of a German soldier in World War I. The significance of this section is that it sheds light on all of the aspects on war, and the fact that war was not what everyone made it seem like. Being from the viewpoint of a soldier, it gives first hand explanation as to what led him to become a solider. It is important to understand that no one really knows what happens in war until you are actually in it.…

    • 565 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    War. Very few words invoke such strong and conflicting reactions. War demands honor and death. War offers hope and despair. War creates the ultimate challenge and the pinnacle of defeat. Throughout history, man struggles to understand war and its impact on the people engaged in its horrors. Paul Baumer, the protagonist in Erich Maria Remarque’s historical fiction novel All Quiet on the Western Front, enlists in the war with his comrades. Throughout the novel images reveal the ultimate emotional and physical destruction faced by Paul and his fellow soldiers, whom World War I corrupts. In his novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, Enrich Maria Remarque employs imagery of animals, nature, and water to convey the theme of destructiveness of war.…

    • 1606 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Written by Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front is a sort of a historical fiction type of book. I would classify it as a fiction because the book is based on an odd point of view in war.…

    • 1097 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    All Quiet on The Western Front is an autobiographical novel written by German WWI veteran Erich Maria Remarque and was published in 1928. What makes this novel so unique and enticing is Remarque’s personal insight on the war which comes from his experiences in WWI. Remarque wrote All Quiet on the Western Front in order to overcome his own traumas that had set in after the war. Remarque was a militant pacifist after his time serving in the German army and bluntly exposes the horrors of war in hopes that the next generation of German youth may learn from their countries mistakes and lead better leaves without the grievance of war. It is precisely for this reason that Adolf Hitler had Remarque’s book burned and forced him to flee the country under the danger of certain execution. Paul Baumer the main character of the novel is a young, intelligent, enthusiastic patriotic teenager with strong ideals which are vehemently strained upon during the war not only because of the fighting but also because of the social ramifications that came with it. Paul Baumer believes that the people he was taught to trust have betrayed him or let him down.…

    • 733 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In “All Quiet on the Western Front” Erich Maria Remarque a German veteran describes the harsh events that happened in WWI. The main character Paul Baumer narrates his story of what happened on the Western Front. Paul and several friends decided to join the army right out of high school at the young age of 19. In the beginning, Paul and his comrades were excited to join the army because they had been given speeches about patriotism, in time they realized that war was not what they thought. The horrors of war became their reality, from the constant losses of comrades to the filthy living conditions in the trenches, they realized any moment could be their last. Paul describes how war changes a person, even after trying to suppress their emotions, the shock they suffered was real. Remarque uses setting, characterization, and Imagery to show how war took the lives of…

    • 1024 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In All Quiet on the Western Front, different attitudes are betrayed from different people. Attitudes that come from various walks of life. When someone lives in a certain area and is surrounded by certain things, I believe it forms your opinion about life and people. That attitude can either make you or break you. War is definitely an example of a situation that can change your thoughts, actions, and emotions.…

    • 625 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    How would you feel if you relied on luck to keep you alive? I think in WWI that the worst thing that happened was the shellings and not knowing were to go or what to do when one was shot off, also seeing some of your closest and best friends killed really destroyed people me tally and ruined them as people knowing that it could've been u instead of them or could be you at any moment. In All Quiet on the Western Front Paul basically says that they believe in luck and that the only chance they have to stay alive in WWI is by luck, and it was very frequent that they’re luck runs out. In WWI the conditions were awful, men were always being brutally killed and the food that the soldiers were provided with frequently gave them different diseases and were often eaten by rats. The men and the dead bodies spread around many diseases, trench foot was especially common among diseases that were caused by standing in muddy and water filled trenches. Paul is the main character in All Quiet on the Western Front. Him and his friends all enlisted in the army when they were 19. When they got to the trenches they met a man named Kat who was much older then them and who quickly became close friends with Paul. Even thought some soldiers survived the shellings and gas, they were still destroyed by the war.…

    • 808 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    At the start of the 20th Century, the world was engaged in a catastrophic battle known as World War 1. During this time questions arose over the true nature of war. Authors such as Siegfried Sassoon and Erich Maria Remarque step out to introduce a different perspective of war through literacy, an outlook which many people in their time were oblivious to. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque is considered to be “the greatest war novel of all time”. In this tale, the story is told from a perspective of a young German soldier, Paul Baumer, a private who changes from the time he first enters the military to his unfortunate death. Erich does an excellent job of revealing the major detriments of war, such as a lost of youth among soldiers as well as desensitization.…

    • 699 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    War can do many horrible things to its soldiers, but it can also save them from themselves. All Quiet on the Western Front written by Erich Maria Remarque is a testament of Paul Bäumer. He and seven classmates enlist in World War I. They experience and witness unspeakable violence becoming soldiers. More violence than anyone should ever see. It corrupts most of the soldier’s minds because of the trauma that they have faced. Although war dehumanized many of the young men, war in many ways made Paul Bäumer more human.…

    • 793 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    War is often viewed as one of the most dangerous and brutal events ever created. It utterly destroys the humanity and mental state of soldiers fighting in the war. In All Quiet on the Western Front, a world renowned war novel by Erich Maria Remarque, the epigraph states that this novel “will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.” Staying true to this quote, Remarque tells of the horrors of World War I and fittingly describes the effects that war has on humans through the eyes of the protagonist, Paul Bäumer. In his epigraph Remarque says, “this book is to be neither an accusation, nor a confession, and least of all an adventure.” Except for a few notable exceptions,…

    • 1401 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    War is good and bad, beneficial and pointless, but above all other things, immensely inhumane. Man created war, and with our controversial human nature egged it on. “All Quiet on the Western Front” by Erich Maria Remarque is a war novel that shows the war experience and how war changes people. During the time spent at the front and at rest the soldier is turned from human to inhumane. They are taken away from the normal human emotion and placed into a state of being more animalistic and superhuman.…

    • 1442 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In the movie “All Quiet on the Western Front”, the German soldiers were sent into the battlefield thinking that they were going to win. The inexperienced boys were persuaded in to fighting and dying for the victory of their country. This brought on a profound sense of disillusionment with the values of Western Civilization.…

    • 512 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    All Quiet on the Western Front not only brings you into the war scene and provides you with a vivid description of the war, but provides you with an opportunity to analyze and take in just how hard the war was on the soldiers who fought for their countries. This book brings you into the war scene and often times has you thinking about just how powerful a war can be on its soldiers. Not only does it depict the war but it brings its audience into a first person’s account of the war and their thoughts going through the war every step of the way.…

    • 1320 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    All Quiet on the Western Front, written in 1929 by Erich Maria Remarque, is superficially the story of one soldiers’ journey in World War 1 and his eventual death. Beneath this, however, Remarque has composed a literary treasure which, above all, seeks to illustrate war as that which is engrained in the nucleus of humanity and through the hugely negative effects of war depicted, seeks to question humanities apparent advancement through its need to engage in such a futile exercise as war. Remarque’s Liberal Humanist ideology is given expression through the correlation between war and nature, thus emphasizing the innate position of war within man, the ultimate paradox contained within an advanced mankind engaging in primitive conflicts and the ironic search for an omniscient being derived from man’s reduction to the barest quest for survival. In addition through the examination of the negativities surrounding the social institutions and hierarchies set up in the absence of god, All Quiet on the Western Front becomes much more than an emotive and well constructed piece of historical realism. In All Quiet on the Western Front, the connections between war and the natural surroundings in which it is fought give rise to the position of war the collective psyche of mankind. The military jargon of the ‚the white puffs of smoke from the tracer bullets‛ is followed by the natural imagery of ‚the sun shining on them‛ in order to emphasize the apparent synchronization between war and nature. The colour imagery of white of the bullets and yellow of the sun, being light colours, connote the harmonious relationship between nature and war. Through the proximity of phrases describing both war and nature in an endearing fashion we are led to conclude that war and nature, or that which is primitive, are fundamentally linked. The gaian imagery ‚Earth, with your ridges and holes and hollows into which a man can throw himself , where a man can hide‛ is ironic as it takes a man-made…

    • 2090 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Erich Maria Remarque was conscripted into the German Army when he was 18. In mid-June of 1917 he was transferred to the Western Front, 2nd Company, Reserves, Field Depot of the 2nd Guards Reserve Division. In late July of the same year, Remarque was wounded by shrapnel in the left leg, right arm, and neck. He then spent the remainder of the war in an Army hospital in Germany. It is important to note these experiences, because as an author, this time in combat gave Remarque an unprecedented level of insight into the life of a soldier in the Great War. The first-hand account from the lowest levels of the German army, literally from the trenches, gives the reader a haunting glimpse of the horrors of trench warfare. The book “All Quiet on the Western Front” was written in only months in 1927, almost as if the story had been in the author’s mind for a decade just waiting to be put on paper. It is, at the most basic level, an anti-war novel. The story is not written as an indictment of Germany’s enemies in the war, but an indictment of war itself. “It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by war.” The overriding theme of the novel is the horrors of war, and the effects war can have on the soldiers at the front. Prior to “All Quiet on the Western Front”, war novels romanticized the glory that a soldier can gain in times of war. However, Remarque set out to describe the war as he himself experienced it, and made no effort to romanticize the feelings of the men at the front. The story is told in first hand narration by the ‘hero’ of the novel, Paul. It begins when Paul and his friends have been relieved from the front, but the reader is already confronted with death as Paul and his friends visit the hospital to find Kemmerich dying from complications arising after a wound. Remarque uses Kemmerich’s death in a variety of ways. The reader discovers that even though technology in weaponry…

    • 1187 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays