How To Write An Essay On All Quiet On The Western Front

Statistically speaking, World War I was the cause of over 17 million deaths and 20 million wounded. The youthful generation are innocent and ignorant soldiers, who believe that war is an adventure, easily getting killed as soon as they step a foot at the front-line. The “Lost Generation” was a term originated from a garage owner in a conversation with his employee that was witnessed by Gertrude Stein, which was later popularised by the American novelist, Ernest Hemingway, as an epigraph to his novel The Sun Also Rises. Also, Stein told Hemingway, “That is what you are. That's what you all are ... all of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation.” In this sense, lost is exemplified as “not vanished, but disoriented, directionless, and wandering.” One of the “Greatest War Novel of All Time,” written by Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front described the journey of a fictional character, Paul Bäumer, who enlists in the German army in World War I with his classmates after listening to their stirring
The fresh troops, including Paul Bäumer himself, become excited and enthusiastic soldiers at first, but would regret their desire of becoming part of the army after the first bombardment in the trenches, calling themselves “Human animals.” They lived in their small bubble of life, where their world of duty, culture, and progress breaks down into pieces, along with his characteristics. As the horrifying experience develops throughout the novel, Paul’s regiments gradually die one by one. Eventually, Paul Bäumer fell in October 1918, on a quiet day at the front, when the war was about to end. The war was a burden and went against the soldiers’ humanity, character, and self-esteem. Through the experiences and hardships Paul Bäumer and his regiments faced, Erich Maria Remarque in All Quiet on the Western Front displays the readers how doubtful and detached from the rest of the society the “Lost Generation” became during World