Summary: All Quiet On The Western Front

Literature of War / Period 1 The Savage Within Throughout Erich Maria Remarque’s novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, vivid images of gruesome animal instincts and the innocent animals’ lives ending are illustrated for the reader repeatedly. Remarque indicates that for a soldier’s survival in battle they must cease sanity and rely solely on primitive instinct. This notion of animal instincts leads soldiers to be less like a human being with rational thoughts. The protagonist, Paul Bäumer, believes he is a “human animal,” and similarly, soldiers who survive multiple attacks think the same. Battle has wounded many, and throughout the novel the reader is given a chance
Poor geese suffer a “[head bash] against the wall to stun them” by Paul who is “like a madman” attempting to kill them for a meal (Remarque 92). Paul and Sanislaus, and older comrade, go off into the woods after an attack at the front trenches stalking and hunting their guiltless preys, the geese. The geese put up a fight before losing their lives to carnivorous soldiers who crave their meat and utilize their feathers for pillow cushions. Geese are not the only victims of human destruction, horses in battle also take the fall when they are the “moaning of the world, [they] are the martyred creation, wild with anguish, filled with terror and groaning” (Remarque 62). Horses are ridden into battle and a couple end up dead or wounded; the few that lie in no man’s land moan in agony and desperately yearn for sympathy. A soldier can no longer take the desperate cries, shoots the horse and the others watch as “slowly, humbly, it sinks to the ground” (Remarque 64). Geese, horses, other animals, and overall Mother Nature are crudely harmed by selfish wars between mankind in this novel, but this novel is a fictional depiction of the harsh realities of