Throughout the story, Paul develops from a child-minded youth to a mature yet disturbed adult. In the last few sentences an omniscient narrator replaces Baumer and announces, “He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.” By the saying of “all quiet” the narrator seems to say that Baumer’s death appears so insignificant, as with many other deaths, that a reporting did not exist. In All Quiet on the Western Front, the men sacrifice everything for nothing. They give up their lives for a set of ideals that are either incomprehensible or false. Corrupt idealistic governments, assembled individual men like pawns and threw them into trenches of hell with their enemies.
The speaker is trapped in desire and cannot find his way out. He then goes and compares desire to a "...fool's self-chosen snare..." illustrating that desire is an act of foolishness, in continuation he accuses desire to be a "...web of will..." which is a difficulty brought by men upon themselves. He continues to use repetition on specific sets of words to emphasize his negative impact with desire. Another example is " With price of mangled mind...", an idea of him trying to accomplish the task of defeating desire yet he does not achieve anything but still loses the sanity he had left. The speaker demonstrates desire to be a trap that you won't ever be able to escape.
On top of their horrible conditions, there was food, clothing, supplies, and weapon shortage. This novel truly describes how soldiers die and in what true conditions they are when in war. This book made you want to hate Germany because these young boys were in a hell hole and all authority ignored them. Even though this book was published before all Nazi violence broke out against Jews, it still seemed like a threat. The world looked at Germany as a very powerful country especially when it came to war, and this book screamed the opposite.
Since Martha never mentions the war in her letters, it becomes easy for him to imagine her as a symbol of love outside of the war. Although Martha does not return his affection, he continues to love her because he can not stop loving all that she represents to him. Martha returns in the next chapter, as Cross explains his interactions with Martha after the war. As he tries to hold her hand and proclaim his love for her, she is tragically indifferent, and it
Little did they know Kemmerich’s death marked the beginning of lost hope. Paul becomes faint, all at once and he could not do anything more. This is expressed by Erich Maria Remarque on page 31 of the novel. This is the response Paul displays over the news of his fellow country men’s death. Paul’s display of grief is emotionally charged, but much different than his first display of his feelings on the war where everyone was full of pride and arrogance.
Many Germans lost their families and houses and had very little food to survive. Supporters of the Nazi party were dumbfounded at the loss of the war. On May 10th, the United States began the process of bringing soldiers home. Unfortunately,
She starts understanding she did not own her house or anything in it, God did. Her belongings are easily attained and lost, so they hold no real value. She states, “To my God my heart did cry to strengthen me in my distresse and not to leave me succourlesse” (Bradstreet). Bradstreet learns
When asked, “Don’t you love your mother, dear boy?” Krebs replies, “No”, adding “I don‘t love anybody“ (Meyer 169). Knowing that she could not possibly understand how he was feeling, Krebs knows he has hurt his mother and convinces her that he did not mean it. Krebs decides that emotional ties to others leads to consequences that he would not ever face again. Although surrounded by people, Krebs is alone within himself. He seems to have a sad emptiness that others cannot
I grab a water and lie on the cot inside of our Canopy, and I sit there patiently for a few minutes until my fellow campers wake up. My friend Jay is the first of my friends to wake up, and he walks out of his tent wondering exactly what I first wondered. He asks, "Where is Austin at?" I respond with a question of my own, "Did he stay here or at his campsite?" He answered," When I fell asleep he was on the cot that you are on, and that was at about 3:30 in the morning."
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.