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Literary review of all things quiet on the western front
The main argument of All Quiet on the Western Front
All quiet on the western front summary
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War is not always what it is expected to be
War is a scary place and you don't realize it until you are actual in the situation itself. “The big soldier hissed at him to shut up but he could not stop giggling and remembering the hot afternoon, and poor Billy Boy, and how they’d been drinking Coca-Cola from bright-red aluminium cans, and how they’d started on the day’s march, and how little while later poor Billy Boy stepped on a mine”(O’brien 202)
This shows the fear of Paul Berlin and how he thinks that war is a joke and realizes that it is real life and he has to face his fear of war.
Paul thought that on the other side of the war would be peace and happiness but instead all he found was a clear ocean and he was still scared.
Paul is afraid
The film brilliantly portrays the war with no enemy’s, just people and relationships. It is the story of friends, Paul Baumer (Lew Ayres) and his friends joining the war through propaganda, and leaving through death.
All Quiet on the Western Front is a book written by Erich Maria Remarque. It was a book written to reflect the human cost of war. It shows us how war has a hidden face that most people do not see until it is too late. In the novel, he describes a group of young men who at first think war is glorious. But as the war drags on, the group discovers how war is not all it is set out to be. As the war went on, they saw their friends either die or be permanently wounded. Then the end comes when there was only one person left.
War can destroy a young man mentally and physically. One might say that nothing good comes out of war, but in Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, there is one positive characteristic: comradeship. Paul and his friends give Himmelstoss a beating in which he deserves due to his training tactics. This starts the brotherhood of this tiny group. As explosions and gunfire sound off a young recruit in his first battle is gun-shy and seeks reassurance in Paul's chest and arms, and Paul gently tells him that he will get used to it. The relationship between Paul and Kat is only found during war, in which nothing can break them apart. The comradeship between soldiers at war is what keeps them alive, that being the only good quality to come out of war.
The older generation had an artificial illusion of what war is and although Paul's generation, the soldiers, loved their country, they were forced to distinguish reality from illusion. Because of this disti...
to deteriorate the human spirit. Starting out leaving you're home and family and ready to fight for you country, to ending up tired and scarred both physically and mentally beyond description. At the beginning of the novel nationalist feelings are present through pride of Paul and the rest of the boys. However at the end of the war it is apparent how pointless war really is.
In the book All Quiet on the Western Front, author Erich Maria Remarque reveals a dimmer sense of the cost of war. The main character in the book, German soldier, Paul Baumer, embodies the cost of war before he reaches his ultimate fate. The tactics and weapons used in World War 1 were more advanced compared to the past as a result of the industrial revolution. Germany was forced to fight a two-front war and this intensified the losses suffered by soldiers like Paul and the other men in the Second Company (Gomez 2016, German Strategy for a Two-Front War – Modern Weapons: War and the Industrial Revolution). Remarque’s observations that he shares with readers are not to World War 1 because it portrayed not only the physical but mental consequences of combat. Regardless of what era of war soldiers were involved in they were the ones who paid the price for facing so much death.
War is not just about the physical things that soldiers carry on a daily basis. The things they carried are so much more, even though the physical does take up a majority of the weight of a soldier. So many emotional burdens and tolls are to be accounted for when thinking about the units of the military fighting in the war and how they have to deal with them while in the midst of gunfire and hell.
In the story, six close friends are persuaded to fight for their country by Kantorek, their schoolteacher, who believes enlisting is an honorable thing to do. After reaching the battlefront, one of Paul’s friends, Kemerich is injured. Kemerich has his leg amputated, but never recovers from the wounds and eventually dies. The outcome of these deaths makes them constantly fear for their lives and this calamity also cause the friends to realize that war is a physical terror. Consequently, when Paul goes home, he feels lost, and distressed around others. He wishes he had never come home. One day, after returning from home to the battlefront, Paul is hiding in to protect himself when an enemy soldier arrives. Paul panics and kills him. After killing the soldier, he’s frightened even more shows remorse to the dead body. At the end, the majority of Paul’s friends have died one after another. Only Paul and his best friend Kat remain alive. Consequently, when Kat dies, it shocks Baumer, feels left alone. Finally, one day near the end of the war, an enemy soldier shoots and kills Paul.
“I wasn’t afraid”(Page 135) as Paul Berlin; a soldier in the Vietnam war, keeps on saying to
When men see tragedies such as, dead men (from both sides) literally stacked upon each other and floods of bodies so thick you can’t walk through, it takes an emotional toll and can even effect the most resilient soldier. This is why Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) was and is one of the most serious illnesses for soldiers in war. Often times we forget that the immediate danger is not always the worst part of war. It is only after the war when men start to think about what they saw and did that they can fully assess what happened and sometimes that can be too much for a man to bear on his
Body parts fly everywhere, one must kill complete strangers, and the unimaginable becomes the norm. These common war occurrences, along with endless others, have disastrous effects on soldiers.
Nash (2007) points out that soldiers exposed to combat have predictable fears, such as the fear of death or serious injury and the loss of fellow soldiers. Several studies have found, however, that these expected fears are not as pervasive as those who have not served in combat may expect (Grossman, 2009).
Throughout their lives, people must deal with the horrific and violent side of humanity. The side of humanity is shown through the act of war. This is shown in Erich Remarque’s novel, “All Quiet on the Western Front”. War is by far the most horrible thing that the human race has to go through. The participants in the war suffer irreversible damage by the atrocities they witness and the things they go through.
The author's main theme centers not only on the loss of innocence experienced by Paul and his comrades, but the loss of an entire generation to the war. Paul may be a German, but he may just as easily be French, English, or American. The soldiers of all nations watched their co...
	The pounding of shells, the mines, the death traps, the massive, blind destruction, the acrid stench of rotting flesh, the communal graves, the charred bodies, and the fear. These are the images of war. War has changed over the centuries from battles of legions of ironclad soldiers enveloped in glimmering armor fighting for what they believe to senseless acts of guerrilla warfare against those too coward to be draft-dodgers. Those who were there, who experienced the terror first hand were deeply effected and changed forever. In their retinas, images of blood and gore are burned for the rest of their life.