All Quiet On The Western Front: A Literary Analysis

During the last year of World War I, Paul Bäumer, a young German soldier, envisions his future after the war when he "Let the months and years come, they can take nothing from me, they can take nothing anymore. I am so alone and so without hope that I can confront them without fear"( Remarque 295). These final despondent thoughts that occurred after Bäumer’s death, is manifested in All Quiet on the Western Front, a war novel written by German soldier, Erich Maria Remarque. Remarque explicates the German soldiers’ physical and psychological stress throughout the war, and the disengagement from pre-war life felt by many of these comrades upon returning to their neighborhood from the trenches, where they faced drenching conditions and abundance

From the beginning, Paul has felt constant fear of death, horror, suffering and hopelessness. Hoping there is a future, Paul and his friends often predict what the future might give. One of these prediction includes Paul’s prediction of 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 uses this imagery to attack the horrible way the opposing sides treated their prisoners. This description makes one think of how devastating and inconsolable the war was and how it changes a person perspective of war. The comrades start to lose their interest in everything but war after being surrounded by constant fear of death and suffering. Smothering throughout the novel, the war gradually changes the attitudes and thoughts of the soldiers toward going home. The loss of generation emerged by being through persistent isolation, violence and disillusionment of the German soldier during World War I. Paul elaborates on the fear everyone gets when hearing the suffering cries of the injured horses at the front : "We can bear almost anything. But now the sweat breaks out on us. We must get

Remarque expounds the idea of soldiers losing interest in civilian life, through the perspective of Paul Baumer, who listens to his comrades talk about their war stories and memories in the rat infested trenches. Gradually throughout the novel, Paul, after his melancholy experiences at the front, starts to disbelieve in human beings or compassion, where he starts to realize at the end of the novel, to "Let the months and years come, they can take nothing from me, they can take nothing anymore. I am so alone and so without hope that I can confront them without fear"( Remarque 295). This incentive quote greatly represents Paul loss of hope, as a result of war. Paul tries to express that the war has taken away everything he believed him, and left him with nothing but fear and hopelessness. Does the brutality and the horror of war, strip away a person’s humanity, or does the horror help retain vestiges of a person old self ? Paul’s loss of hope is similar to Eliezer in Night, where he loses faith in God and is exposed to the corrupt, inhumane society around him, during the Holocaust. This transformation from pre-war and post-war