Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet On The Western Front

ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT The author Erich Maria Remarque wrote the book All Quiet on the Western Front to present how a group of naive and enthusiastic teenagers endure and suffer from the cruel battlefield during WWI. All of them are motivated by propaganda techniques to join the army and they expected the quick end of the war. However, none of them seems to realize the fact that they are not able to go back unless they died or the enduring war ends. From their belongings, the readers can understand that these people think the war is almost the same as a field research but without a teacher. The story is going to be told along the process of the war. The author will use first person point of view to express his impression towards the war, and
he will depict trench warfare and how they overcome numerous attacks. Since the author and his classmates volunteer to be one part of the army to support their country, he will focus on how their mind set varied as the war continues. Moreover, he will choose to demonstrate some specific scenes and make a comparison to express the difficulty and difference that forces four members aware of the fact that war does not appear as their thoughts.
The theme that the terrible brutality of war will be developed throughout the book. Initially, the story was describing how the battlefield presented in the book and the impact of the continuous war. The main characters experienced the cruelty of the war. Their impression and their thoughts would indirectly reflect the real situation that how the enemy attacked, how their classmates treat them. Talking about the main characters. Paul Bäumer and his company are the main characters who changed significantly from the beginning of war till the end. Their attitude, their passion, and their hopes to live were transformed completely. At first, they are passionate volunteers who were considering the war a new experience. Some of them even brought books and dreaming about plans after finishing the quick war. Throughout the novel, Paul is the center among all of them. His experience is intended to represent the experience of a whole generation of men who went straight from childhood to fighting in World War I. His actual personality contradicts with the way the war forces him to act and feel. His memories of the time before the war show that he was once a very different man from the despairing
soldier who now narrates the novel. Due to the horror of the war and the anxiety, Paul, like other soldiers, learns to disconnect his mind from his feelings, keeping his emotions at bay in order to preserve his sanity and survive. From this character, the author expresses the main theme sufficiently and effectively. Paul represents most of the soldiers who comes to war. They are confused and stressed about their situations and future. Most of them choose to detach themselves from their feelings and rely on instinct to kill and survive in battle.e.