Hour 7
1/3/13
All Quiet On the Western Front
“The front is a cage in which we must await fearfully whatever may happen” said Paul in All Quiet On the Western Front. In this book friends from college are recruited to the army to fight for their country in the Great War. The boys were full of pride until they got to the front and were conquered by fear. The front wasn’t what they expected; everything that was done was for nothing but survival. Like any war the war came to an end but not all the college classmates/friends survived, and many of them didn’t get the chance to visit their families. This was a good book due to its tone, theme, point of view, and plot.
The theme is the brutality of war. When the college friends were discussing about the war they’re about to take part in, Kropp said “Two years of shells and bombs a man won’t peel it off as easy as a sock” (Remarque 87). This shows the brutality of the war because it describes the effect the war puts on people is not easy to forget and for many, it’s permanent. As the friends were taking turns discussing war, Albert explained his view saying “The war has ruined us for everything” (Remarque 87). This shows brutality of war as well because it shows how broad the effect war is on people’s life. The theme of this book makes it a good book because its outcomes relates to the wars going on around the world right now. And it has important message/lesson on life in the front in the Great War, instead of just viewing the honor/patriotic part of the war it mainly focused on a very important part; fear and pressure. Thus the theme of this book is the brutality of war because of the characters description of the life at the front.
This book is from a point of view of the narrator Paul. He is a soldier at the front who describes the different people around him, and their experiences and his own experiences. If this book was told from someone’s point of view other than Paul, the book wouldn’t be
Cited: Remarque, Erich Maria. All Quiet on the Western Front: The Illustrated Edition. Trans. A. W. Wheen. Boston: Little, Brown, 1996. Print.