An Analysis Of Erich Maria Remarque's 'All Quiet On The Western Front'

Noah Shamsai

Ms. Humes

AS English II

13 November 2014

The Lost Generation “Only the dead have seen the end of the war,” says Plato, and those who survive continue to be touched by the experience of the front. In Erich Maria Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front”, Paul Bäumer, representative of World War I’s youth soldiers, describes his escapade in war, filled with life, death, and horror. The young, unmarried soldier will be lost even if he survives the war because of a loss of ambition, a loss of innocence, and a loss of relatability. The first reason the men in the war will be destroyed by it is because they all become cannon fodder, expendable entities that no longer have any aspirations, and therefore are unable to assimilate into

And so it would seem. [They] had as yet taken no root. The war swept [them] away … [The men] knew only that in some strange and melancholy way [they] had become a waste land” (20). Early in the novel, Paul has already decided that he and his troop of young men have been destroyed by the war, as a plant that has been pulled up before its roots have taken hold in the soil, the youth have little previous life, and of that nothing remains. Before the warfare, the men had just begun to construct their life goals, but the combat cleared away these hopes, and hence, upon returning home, the young men will be misplaced in the world. Another statement that further expresses Paul’s lack of objectives is given when his comrades are inquiring about what Paul plans to do if he were to return from the war: “When [Paul hears] the word ‘peace-time,’ it goes to [his] head: and if it really came, [he thinks he] would do some unimaginable thing

While the older, settled men simply see the war as bump in the road of life, the young men are so traumatized and altered by it, as if in their road of life, they crossed the bridge of war, which fell behind them, leaving a gap between who they were and who they are now. In Paul’s final passage, he blatantly states, “Men will not understand [the young, unmarried group of soldiers] − for the generation that grew up before [them] … will now return to its old occupation, and the war will be forgotten − and the generation that has grown up after [them] will be strange to [them] and push [them] aside … the years will pass by and in the end [they] shall fall into ruin”