All Quiet On The Western Front Critical Analysis

The novel All Quiet on the Western Front was published in 1929. Many publishers doubted its success since it appeared to be exceedingly honest and was not typical for the then social ideology of glorification of defeated Germany in the First World War. Erich Maria Remarque, who went off to war as a volunteer in 1916, was not so much a creator of this literary breakthrough but a witness of merciless European battlefields. The author described the horrors of war honestly, simply, without unnecessary emotions, but with the ruthless brutality of that destroyed his generation forever. All Quiet on the Western Front is not the novel about heroes but about the victims, to which Remarque classifies both the victims and young survivors. The novel All
It brings death, pain, blood, blaze through the states and whole nations. The victims of it are ordinary people, for whom war is unnatural, but against their own free will, they are involved in a fatal battle. With no doubts, any war forces to drastically change something in view of life. For instance, it is not a crime to kill an enemy in the war, and any soldier ready to die himself, if knows that is done in the name of something valuable. However, when the war ends, the history mainly shows that the life does not come back on track, especially after such massacres as the First World War was. For four years soldiers were fighting, not actually seeing the point. Undoubtedly, they were defending their country, although it was not clear from whom and for what. As it is known, this war not only caused radical changes in world politics, in the distribution of roles of the world powers but also become a catalyst for the revolution and the collapse of empires. All of these changes inevitably made an impact on lives of multiple people. That is of Erich Maria Remarque wrote. He tried to convey the witnessed suffering during the war, pity he felt towards the broken destinies of comrades, and also love and friendship during the course of this disastrous period. The wars that followed World War I, were even more violent and bloody. However, the human suffering in subsequent wars has become more
In conclusion, it must be stated that All Quiet on the Western Front is written for a bulk audience, and this novel has become something, even more, greater than a fictional work. Experts in literature and history, American and German adults, young people, wealthy and destitute, will all undoubtedly learn something valuable from this novel. Modern youth mainly demands an adventure story saturated with violence and sex and this book covers this demand. For the overall adult audience, it is a story of an uphill battle and an allusion of what these young but great soldiers went through. This novel helps to illustrate the rooted motifs of their actions. Since Remarque was an actual witness to all the war horrors, for historians, All Quiet on the Western Front presents bare and sometimes the unimaginable truth about the First World War. For experts in literature, the novel proffers a plenty of literary instruments by means of which Remarque manages to tell the story that is even more impressive than it is on paper. That includes foreshadowing, allusion and symbolism. The novel holds the interest and attention till its end and is able to captivate the mind of the reader. However, it is even more important that it forces to analyze and to question why things happened such way. Over the course of the book, the author also tries to teach the readers.