Each man writes more than just an account of the battles he fought in during World War One; each narrative is his account of the relationships he involves himself in, with men he grew up with, with men he led, with the people of the occupied France, and with the men he fought to kill. Robert Graves describes the apprehension he feels concerning becoming a gentleman through the lessons he learned as a child. That “two sorts of Christians existed – ourselves, and the lower class” was a shock described as his first “shudder of gentility;” (Graves, p. 14), one which Graves never learned to understand. Nowhere in Good-Bye to All That does Graves admit to accepting the facts of the society in which he grew up. Motivated by his disgust of “class hierarchy” and “meaningless privileges,” (as described by Paul Fussell in the introduction) (Fussell, p. v), Graves wanted to escape, at least as long as the war would last.
Which sets the book of to a strong start, as the declaration was passionately written during the war. Siegfried Sassoon used repetition through his declaration , making sure that he feels strongly against war. During the declaration Sassoon explains the horrors if war in many different ways. He repeats the word “suffering” throughout the declaration to put emphasis on what the war is really like for the soldiers that are fighting for our country. He also talks strongly about how the sufferings are being “prolonged” as he tired of witnessing men “being sacrificed” to this awful war.
All Quiet on the Western Front is a novel about World War I. It is narrated by Paul Bäumer, who is the main character. Paul discusses how his life changed instantly after witnessing the horrors of war life. This novel brings up many aspects of the effects of war. The element that really stood out from this novel was how ordinary everyday matters were highlighted.
War is never a pretty thing. We’re separated by the ones we love, lose the ones we care about, and forget who we were before it all began. In the novel All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, it proves just that when a group of soldier’s lives are completely turned around due to the effects of war. The narrator and protagonist of the book Paul Baumer, persuaded by his schoolmaster Kantorek, volunteers for the war at the tender age of nineteen with friends Kropp, Muller and Leer, hoping to be considered courageous once he joins the war. Kantorek often calls them the iron youth because he describes their efforts as brave and heroic.
The classic anti-war film All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), directed by Lewis Milestone, has been restored by the Library of Congress Motion Picture Conservation Centre. Based on the best-selling novel by Erich Maria Remarque, the book and film tell the story of a group of German students who volunteer to fight in the 1914-18 War. It is not a story of heroes, but of ordinary young men trapped in a terrestrial hell; a bitter critique of war that resonates as powerfully today as it did before the next ‘war to end all wars’. All Quiet on the Western Front was not the only film inspired by the First World War. One of the most famous, Abel Gance’s J’accuse (whose title echoes the notorious Dreyfus affair of 1894) appeared in 1919.
Dalton Trumbo's anti-war novel, Johnny Got His Gun, ideally captures the horrors of war, and its effects on individual soldiers, their fate, their mentality, and their families. The author introduces the reader to Joe Bonham, a young American soldier tragically wounded on the last day of World War One. Throughout the story, the author leads the reader through the emotions, thoughts, and reflections of the protagonist, and also to the honesty and detail with which the story is written, the reader is able to fully experience the impact and the tragedy of war. But with tragedies of war also brings upon the suppression of war, and with the novel Lord of the Flies, William Golding shows how our society suppresses the evil that is presented in all of us. Throughout this adventure Jack changes from a well mannered choir boy, who was scared to kill a pig, to a savage hunter who leads his band of hunters to kill everything in site.
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.
David Zheng Mr. Gutmann AP literature November 27, 2012 The Impact of The First Person Narrative Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, a fictional account of the Great War, articulates the individual’s struggle against overbearing forces outside of his realm of control. The various countries involved in the complex war, especially Germany, blindly lodge into a conflict so grand that a “lost generation” conceives. The corrupt yet patriotic members of the older generation in Germany impose their fatalistic ideals on the younger generation, which inevitably crumbles under the gruesome nature of war. In the wake of the soldiers walks death, which garners fear in them to the extent of taking up violence as a means to extinguish it. Remarque employs the first person narrative and allows readers to follow the accounts of Paul Baumer, an
Remarque articulates his anti-war message by portraying the brutality of war, and the negative effect it has on a generation. Remarque makes a clear point that war is not a commodity for men to become hero but rather brutal and unrelenting. He describes many scenes that portray the bloody horrors of war. The most obvious example is when Paul is walking around the hospital and describes the injuries that soldiers suffer from and he says, “a hospital alone shows what war is” (Remarque 263). This very blatant observation demonstrates Remarque’s point that war is simply gruesome.
Remarque uses the First World War as a primary setting in All Quiet on the Western Front to show the frontline experiences of Paul Baumer, an 18-year-old recruit for the German army who loses his innocence through his experiences in war. The opening of the novel juxtaposes the instances Paul considers “wonderfully good” (7) with instances of pure terror and fear on the battlefields of France, forcing him to become “hard, suspicious, pitiless, vicious, tough…” (26). Remarque uses the battlefield’s unrelenting violence to communicate a sense of terror amongst the soldiers in his vivid depictions of “shells, gas clouds, and flotillas of tanks – shattering, corroding, death. Dysentary, influenza, typhus – scalding, choking, death. Trenches,