Maestro Dialectical Journal Analysis

Paul learns the briefness of life in retrospect of all other things. He sees his closest comrades and best friends die beside him, leaving him with a feeling of urgency to live a life worth living, as it could end at any minute. Simply stated by Paul, “Life is short” (139). Paul and his living comrades aspire to, “make ourselves as comfortable and sleep, and eat as much as we can stuff our bellies, and drink and smoke so that hours are not wasted” (139). Paul realizes that every minute lived is one minute closer to his inevitable death, whether it be from fighting or disease or natural causes, as James Dean declared, “Dream as if you’ll live forever. Live as if you’ll die today.”
The sexualization of women to persuade young men to enlist in
Soon after he enters, another man stumbles into Paul’s bunker, a Frenchman. Paul has already thought over what to do if this should happen, “What will you do if someone jumps into your shell-hole?--Swiftly I pull out my little dagger, grasp it and bury it in my hand once again under the mud. If anyone jumps in here I will go for him. It hammers in my forehead; at once, stab him clean through the throat, so that he cannot call out; that’s the only way; he will be just as frightened as I am; when in terror we fall upon one another, then I must be first” (215). Soon later Paul’s imagined horror comes to life. A Frenchman falls into the shell-hole and Paul follows through with his prepared plan, stabbing the man, though failing to kill him. This personal and intimate confrontation with the enemy, and Paul’s first time killing a man with his own hands leads to Paul slowly lose mental stability. First, Paul begins to hear the gurgling of the dying man, this is a mirror to the earlier description of the dying horses. The sounds of death are worse than any other noise to enter the ears. Soon later the Frenchman dies, leaving Paul alone in a shell-hole with the outcome of his own actions dead in front of him. This realization bashes Paul’s mentality about death as he has now seen it not only personal but due to his reaction. Paul begins talking to the dead man, and rummages through the
The generation from the fighting will be vagabonds if they return home, “And men will not understand us-for the generation that grew up before us, though it has these years with us already to its old occupations, and the war will be forgotten-and the generation that has grown up after us will be strange to us and push us aside” (294). The generation of young people that the war has consumed will, if alive, never be accepted by any who did not experience the war. Those soldiers who have wasted their years, no longer have hope of a future, as Paul describes, “Let the months and years come, they can take nothing from me, they can take nothing more. I am so alone, and so without hope that I can confront them without fear. The life that has borne me through these years is still in my hands and my eyes. Whether I have subdued it, I know not. But so long as it is there it will seek its own way out, heedless of the will that is within me” (295). Paul’s end comes on a quiet October day in 1918. He went with peace and an expression of relief, to finally be free from the Hell he had found himself engulfed in. “He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though he was sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come”