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

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All Quiet on the Western Front is the incredibly somber story of a group of six young German boys who volunteered to fight in World War I. The novel, written by Erich Maria Remarque, is narrated by one Paul Baümer who experiences the terrible emotional and physical afflictions of war. Through Paul, the reader is given what remains to this day one of the greatest depictions of what life was like on the frontlines and in the trenches. The novel begins behind the German lines of the Western Front in the summer of 1916. The main cast of characters that will be followed throughout the story are briefly introduced. Paul, Tjaden, Müller, and Albert are all nineteen years of age and have all enlisted at the encouragement of their schoolteacher. Their service as soldiers has been painted as a valiant and noble, though no less expected, effort. The realities of life as a soldier, however, have already begun to plague the young men. Their fellow classmate and friend Kemmerich has been hospitalized with a flesh …show more content…
despite the fact that it is told from the point of view of a German soldier, it becomes all the more clear that this was a war that nobody wanted. Whether the young men fighting were French, American, German, it did not matter. They all fought simply because they felt that they had to. And yet, they did not know what they were really fighting for. The war took everything from them, including their lives. The biggest takeaway one is left with when they read this book is the incredible impact that such devastating conflict has on those that fight in it. The end is nothing short of depressing, and yet that is exactly what it is supposed to be. War is not happy, it is not a joyful experience in the least. And that is precisely the point of this novel. It is meant to be an uncensored, gritty, no-holds-barred depiction of what war really
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completely broken down and there was no recovery: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…” (Doc 4). German writer Erich Maria Remarque described the hopelessness that people around him had been experiencing since the end of the war. Germans in particular had been hit especially hard by the results of the war, which Remarque described in his “All Quiet on the Western Front”, in which he wrote “... Our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterwards? And what shall come of us…

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