He is distraught to kill a man that he finds out has a wife and child. This brings the realization to Paul of the total senselessness of war. Baumer’s narrative of war is not romantic, but ugly. By late 1918, Paul is still alive but his friends are dead. The rumor was that the Germans would surrender soon.
Only certain men are able to live through the filthy conditions of the hospital. Several are too weak and die from infection. Social Darwinism is everywhere, survival of the fittest. Towards the end of the movie, young soldier Paul Baumer, must go back to tell his best friend’s mother that her child is dead. However, he can’t bear to tell her the truth of her son’s awful, painful death.
Paul joined the army directly after high school and never really experienced life. Due to his inexperience and lack of knowledge of the world, the war becomes Paul’s life and in the end, his destruction. I think there were three turning points in Paul’s experience of the war which changed his perspective - when he kills a French soldier in close combat, when he returns home, and when the war appears to be lost and coming to an end. Paul is an experienced fighter whose bullets have killed many people but he has never thought philosophically about that fact. He is fighting for a cause he doesn’t really understand but yet he continues to kill and see his friends die.
English 2 H, P. 4 20 January 2012 War’s warping ways: Analysis of Remarque's Use of Imagery to Demonstrate the Destructiveness of War in His Novel, All Quiet on the Western Front George McGovern opines, “I’m fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.” Young men’s lives forever change by entering battles which they do not comprehend. Older men who declare war easily sacrifice innocent lives. Similarly, in Erich Maria Remarque’s novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, nineteen year old Paul Baumer departs for the German Army. He becomes a victim of war, sentenced to death by government officials who persuade him and many other young men into fighting battles for their own essential needs. Paul and his comrades enlist as fresh creatures of the world that change due to the abhorrence in World War One.
As the war continues, they continue to fight and accept the death of their friends easily. Many men die, friends and enemies, and it shows the different life of their days off to their days fighting or in the hospital. Finally, at the end, one of the main characters, Paul, is welcoming the new naïve recruits and gets killed reaching for a butterfly just outside the
In the book, after the area that Paul and his company were fighting was gassed, one of his comrades was losing air in his mask, so he instinctively removed his mask and inhaled the poison, then die immediately. In films and on television the winners of a battle often win large pieces of land and quickly gain control of the war. But Erich Maria Remarque, the author, shows that they only win insignificant little pieces of land, which unfortunately are usual lost again later. A
He proves that he is not in the quote “He remembered kissing her good night at the dorm door. Right then, he thought, he should’ve done something brave,” maybe his cowardice is what motivated him to sign up for the war and prove to Martha that he was man enough and maybe this act of his would make her love him like he loved her. Later on in the story Lieutenant Cross ends up burning the letters and photographs that he has been carrying after his platoon mate and friend Ted Lavender is shot and killed. This is a turning point for the character as he blames himself for the death of his friend. “Slowly a bit distracted, he would get up and move among his men checking the perimeter, then at full dark he would return to
Henry does not envision himself in a project involving the liberation of slaves. For him it is a good opportunity for personal aggrandizement. The reality of a war hit him when a soldier is hit by a bullet. “He blanched like one who has come to the edge of a cliff at midnight.” “He is caught unaware by the death in war and as he had feared, runs from his first battle while his comrades are still facing the enemy. Fleming initially goes through a period of denial after he flees from battle.
Some people consider the unusual events surrounding the opening of the tomb as evidence for a ‘curse’. Some think this may have occurred due to the items in his tomb that were collected and broken and even king tuts mummy itself was said to have been chopped into pieces and parts were even missing. According to legend, lord Carnarvon soon died from a mosquito bite and his three legged dog howled and dropped dead and all the lights went out in the city of Cairo. And then others of Carter’s party began to die of mysterious causes. Carter, himself had to suffer the fate of watching all his friends and associates drop off like flies, even his pet was killed by a cobra in a freak incident.
She experiences an epiphany that their vision of the ideal lifestyle was just all a fantasy when she discovers that the sailor died of an overdose of lead in his canned food that he ate. When Vincent dies, she realizes that, “there were consequences to after all; but they were consequences to things you didn’t even know you’d done” (Atwood, 644) after. Vincent dies at a young age from an unknown virus as a consequence, “because he never seemed to be afraid of anything that might happen to him” (Atwood, 636). Jane also suffers from a life of being lonely and sad after a loss of a significant friend in her life. Vincent could be taken from her life because Jane did not realize that the lifestyle they wanted was unattainable and they couldn’t be anything more than friends.