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Recommended: All quiet on the western front critiques

The Lost Generation From sunrise to sunset, day after day, war demolishes men, cities, and hope. War has an effect on soldiers like nothing else, and sticks with them for life. The damage to a generation of men on both sides of the war was inestimable. Both the novel All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, and the poem “I Have a Rendezvous with Death,” by Alan Seeger, demonstrate the theme of a lost generation of men, mentally and physically, in war through diction, repetition, and personification. Diction is strongly used in both the novel and the poem to manipulate the thoughts of the reader and to stir up emotions. The poem makes an almost undecipherable, literal tone within the sound of the rhyme scheme, also creating calm peace with a mostly unpleasant situation. An example is the reoccurring line, “I have a rendezvous with Death” (Seeger 1, 5, 11, 20). The word “rendezvous” is a nice word where a person would meet somebody out of free will, even like to two lovers seeing each other. Differently, death is the unknown for many humans to fear. The narrator has arranged to meet with an experience known as death. The narrator would only take such actions if he had reason to believe it was not as fearful an action to take as so many believe. The repetition of this line keeps this idea fresh in his audience’s mind. Similarly, in All Quiet on the Western Front, Remarque uses word like forgotten and misunderstood to describe the way that outsiders think of the soldiers participating in the war. The way Baumer states: “And men will not understand us—for the generation that grew up before us, though it has passed these years with us already had a home and a calling; now it will return to its old occupations, and the... ... middle of paper ... ...nds of his enemy. Unlike the speaker in Seeger’s poem, Paul accepts the fact that he has no control over his life when in the middle of a bombardment. War deprives soldiers of so much that there is nothing more to take. No longer afraid, they give up inside waiting for the peace that will come with death. War not only takes adolescence, but plasters life with images of death and destruction. Seeger and Remarque demonstrate the theme of a lost generation of men in war through diction, repetition, and personification to relate to their readers that though inevitable and unpredictable, death is not something to be feared, but to calmly be accepted and perhaps anticipated. The men who fight in wars are cast out from society, due to a misunderstanding of the impact of such a dark experience in the formative years of a man’s life, thus being known as the lost generation.

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