It is impossible to go through life without trust..." This quote doesn't apply to All Quiet on the Western Front because the main character Paul Baumer and his friends trusted their teacher Kantorek and went to fight in the World War. They all eventually died in this war and the war also shortened their lives greatly. They trusted Kantorek thinking the war would be amazing and they would be doing a great service for their country. However the complete opposite happened. They hated the war and lost their lives.
He decides to go to war because he is ashamed of running from it. “It had nothing to do with mortality. Embarrassment, that's all it was” (O’Brien 59). That same feeling of embarrassment is what made half of the soldiers go to Vietnam. Jimmy Cross went to war only because his friends did, and that led him to danger.
Soldiers adapt to the different criterions of war, to the point where the word death loses its emotional value. In the text, All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, ceaselessly slaughtering people merely becomes a soldier’s duty. Paul says, “We have become wild beasts…we can destroy and kill to save ourselves.”(Remarque, 15) This shows that death no longer is considered a sensitive topic, in the soldiers’ views. Also, they don’t have any humane thoughts/feelings before assassinating someone because it becomes a part of their reflexive skills and therefore, requires no second thoughts or sensitive feelings. They seem to be indifferent to the fact that they have killed someone because assassination merely becomes their ‘job.’ In a similar manner, Generals Die in Bed by Charles Yale Harrison, is inclusive of the same insensitiveness and indifference towards the death and murdering of people.
In another case, Paul is seen trying to save the life of an enemy that he has stabbed, he fails but his efforts shouldn’t be forgotten. His friends refer to him as a hero, and he neglects this title and all the medals. Paul doesn’t like war and what it represents, to him, war is the real evil. The government forcing people into war, without giving them a choice is evil War can easily turn any person into a hero. Corporal Himmelstoss was an average polite postman before being drafted into World War I, not soon after he became a bully.
In All Quiet on the Western Front the protagonist is Paul Baumer because we experience the story from his point of view and thus we sympathize with him. Paul’s situation is troubling because his life and the lives of other soldiers his age “have become a wasteland” (20). War has changed them and the world so much that they don’t really know what they are going to do once the war finishes. They don’t know any trades; all they know is war. The value of their lives was also changed by war.
“Generals Die in Bed” shows that humans are totally dehumanised by war. Discuss. ‘Generals Die in Bed’, written by Charles Yale Harrison demonstrates the tremendous impact that war can have on an ordinary man and the dehumanising acts that this entails. It shows that the battle of war can test the dignity and morals of men and the emotional impact of this can further destroy that of comradeship and mateship. However, when all dignity and values seem lost, signs of their former selves can, and do return.
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
While missions certainly beget terror, the missions are extremely short and sporadic. Instead of fighting honorably and helping Vietnamese civilians in need, Perry and his fellow soldiers find themselves waiting for the next sneak attack, gripped with anxiety. Plagued with this anxiousness about the next attack, the soldiers often wait weeks in complete paranoia. Originally confident and expectant that glorious combats would fill them up with a sense of self worth, Perry and the young soldiers actually feel let down, disgruntled and paranoid. In addition, further negating their romantic views of war, Richie, Peewee, and the others find the army and active combat to be disorganized, completely inefficient and completely feeble; disillusioned by the concept of war, the young soldiers begin realize that perhaps war was not as glorious as they hoped it to be.
Nobody likes the war and nobody wants to fight but for some reason the world had a problem and it needed to be fixed. The war has its positives but there are a lot more negatives such as, the draft, people leaving their family, death, etc... The point that rash tries to prove about the war in this essay, is when the farmer talks about losing his own boy in the war. “He fought for Mr. Lincoln do he?” the boy asked “not no more” the farmer replies. Whether the farmer is an antagonist or protagonist in this story, Rash still portrays him to be sad and pissed that his son died in the
Despite that deaths like this are commonly caused by freak incidents, he feels that if his attention had been focused on the war at the very moment Lavender died instead of the girl whose love he can never obtain, he could have prevented this loss of life. As a result of his remorse, Cross decides to remove all distractions he possibly can and “[burns] Martha’s letters [followed by] the two photographs” (O’Brien 23) of her. It is Lavender’s unexpected death that helps Lieutenant Cross recognize his responsibility to his men who are counting on him to direct them around the perils of Vietnam. When he is contemplating how to alter his tactics of leadership for the better, he reminds “himself that his obligation [is] not to be loved but to lead]” (O’Brien 26). By doing this, Lieutenant Cross demonstrates that he has the ability to learn from his past mistakes and improve his accountability to lead his men to