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.
Although most war novels are filled with patriotism and honor, Remarque’s instead focuses on the brutality and senselessness of war. The main character, Paul Baumer, serves in the German Army during WWI. The novel shows his struggles throughout the war and it seems that Baumer resembles Remarque and his own struggles of war. In the novel, Baumer and his comrades endure a full scale war. The novel shoes the misery of war and the everlasting effects it has on the soldiers; even Baumer cannot escape those circumstances.
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.
Kantorek often calls them the iron youth because he describes their efforts as brave and heroic. As a member of the Second Company, Paul has doubts in his choices when his classmate Joesph Behm is one of the first to die when enlisted in war. To make matters worst, Paul’s friend Kemmerich loses his leg and has a slow and painful death. Paul then has the burden of telling Kemmerich’s mom of her son’s death, especially when she confides in him to watch over her son during the war. As the war continues, the leader of the Second Company Himmelstoss is disliked by many of the soldiers because of his harsh tactics and insensible actions.
Paul, in one heroic moment, carried an injured friend, Albert all the way to a camp, only to finally find out that he had died along the way. Human dignity that you once possessed is long lost as you experience all the horrific events and see all the deaths. Nothing really matters except the fact that you are alive
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque is the beautiful and enthralling tale of the young Paul Bäumer and the horrors and misfortune he faces during World War I. I, for one, really liked the book, however depressing it is, and I now consider it to be one of my personal favorites. Not only does it represent the psychological change that can take place in a human being during a time of war, but it also represents the worth of human life and how little regard there was for it. I can’t say I like any of the battle scenes, I was very disappointed by the death of Paul’s friends, who I had learned to love over the course of the book, they were ripped away so suddenly, but a soldier gets used to that. I had bought this book a few years ago, knowing that it was a classic book that I would probably need later on, and I sat down and tried to read it. I found that I had no patience for it, it was far too depressing and boring, but I suppose that back then I was too naïve to truly understand the depth of it.
(Remarque, (1996), p. 21) This quote shows the emotional impact Kemmerich’s death has on Paul Baumer. Throughout the text all of Paul’s other friends from his class either died, are injured and sent home or try to run away. ‘I am the last one from the seven from our class still here.’ (Remarque, (1996), p. 199) Paul only has one person left, the person he looked up to most; Private Stanislaus Katczinsky. After Kat dies because of shrapnel in his head, Paul has no friends left, and no one to support him. The idea that he would have no friends fills him with a fear of being lonely.
They never found the driver who had hit and killed Tanner’s father. He was very sad he loved his Father a lot. In less than a year of his Father’s death his Mother remarried an insurance man named Floyd. Soon Tanner had a stepbrother Damon and it make him feel like he never was a part of the family. Only his Grandma Brice made him feel loved even more then his own mother.
He, his mother and sisters were parted at the camp and he has no hope to see them ever again. "Men to the left! Women to the right..."(pg 27). Elie’s father is old and weak and he realizes his father will not survive on his own. He also knows it may be too late to save him.
As the reader is imagining a war going on, the “killer” in the story is your caring, insightful, old man who is trying to bond with his Grandson. “We are standing in the dark and looking at each other and the story is the same and different- like last time, except this time his tears come so fast they’re like lather.” (Orner 553) With all of the descriptions, the reader is able to relate and connect with the story on a personal level. Grandpa crying will pull the