They are sworn to action, means even if the soldiers were trapped and unable to get out of the war; they still have to fight until they are either dead or badly wounded. In the ninth and tenth lines, Sassoon talked about how he sees the war though his mind, like when he said “foul dug-outs”, and “ruined trenches”. He uses that particular imagery to get a picture in the readers mind about the horrible living conditions. “Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats /And mocked with hopeless longing to regain,”. “Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats,” makes me think of the soldiers having a flashback to when they were young, when they were still free, which makes them re-thinking their decision of fight in the war.
The two works talk about disillusionment in two different ways, from two different perspectives and yet they convey the same message about disillusionment; war is never as honorable as it is shown throughout the media. In the first chapters of All Quiet on the Western Front Paul and his friends are getting pressured at a young age by their schoolmaster Kantorek and he talks about patriotism and how
In an ever-changing world, never has a war been so innovatively brutal as the First World War. One can speak of dehumanization, animalization and desensitization, evoking images of pain, terror and deadening. In his novel All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque melancholically, yet beautifully, depicts the absolute horrors of war and the way this gruesomeness affected the common soldier, analyzing both the psychological and the physical aspects, and assessing the ultimate ramification on its often-innocent victims. Through means of his pivotal narrator Paul Baümer, how effective was Remarque’s novel as a critique and debunking of World War I actually? The most obvious predominant theme of All Quiet on the Western Front is of course the incessant brutality of modern warfare, which the reader can experience in every single chapter.
War habitually desensitizes and numbs the fighting soldiers due to the harsh, crippling events they have witnessed. War creates a feeling of endless hopelessness felt by the comrades during the war. In “All Quiet on the Western Front”, Erich Maria Remarque exposes the change of characterization of Paul Baumer from an innocent boy transformed by the monstrosities of war into a desensitized soldier by repeating the pattern of soldiers going to the front, being at the front, and then being away from the front to expose the personal destruction caused by it. On the way to the front, the comrades are experiencing rising anxiety and intimidating tension from the realization of the unavoidability death on the frontline. For example Baumer is thinking, “Every time it is the same.
In Walt Whitman’s “By the Bivouac’s Fitful Flame” we see the poem being narrated from the perspective of a soldier in war who is settled on the floor as a procession winds around him. This soldier has experienced horrifying events from the battles and has lost many things because of it; nevertheless he continues the fight and soothes himself with thoughts of his loved. Whitman uses the word procession three different times in this poem and they all refer to the same type of procession because of the homogeneous terms he uses to describe each, because of the events he describes around him and his reference to the procession as thoughts. They all refer to the same procession because of the almost identical terms he uses to describe each. The
This book, All Quiet on the Western Front, gives countless examples that point to the main theme, war causes nihilism. During the war, soldiers lose their innocence. One example is when a new fair-haired recruit lost his innocence during his first bombing in the trenches. This boy is scared out of his mind. He is huddled on the ground in fetal position and his helmet has fallen off.
Remarque uses diction and syntax as literary devices to express his anti-war theme, or lesson. Using diction, Remarque is able to communicate an anti-war theme in the novel All Quiet on the Western Front. For example, after a very arduous battle, Paul tells the reader “Monotonously the lorries sway, monotonously come the calls, monotonously falls the rain” (24). The use of the word monotonously shows how monochrome, black and white, and lifeless and dull the world feels. Furthermore, after another battle, Paul tells the reader “And at each call a little group separates itself off, a small handful of dirty, pallid soldiers, a dreadfully small handful, and a dreadfully
This idea is further reinforced by the rhetorical question, “In what cold clockwork of the stars and nations Was he the hand pointing that second?” This metaphor displays his uncertainty as per his crucial part in that moment in time. The soldier pictures himself as the hand on a clock, subject to the inevitable force of a clockwork motor that cannot be slowed or quickend. He realises that he does not really know why he is running and feels “statuary in mid-stride”. However, towards the end of the poem, all moral justifications for the existence of war have become meaningless- “King, honour, human dignity, etcetera Dropped like luxuries in a yelling alarm”, which is extremely dismissive of all the motives people provide for joining the army, explicitly stating that those motives do not justify and do not withstand the war. Disorientation is also highlighted in the line “Stumbling across a field of clods towards a green hedge That dazzled with rifle fire” where the confusion between the natural world and man-made world is expressed.
The audience can predict the “gutter” could be a trench used in the war. So the soldier went to the trench to lie down and die. There is also another shift when the author says “and soundlessly attending, dies…”. In the last stanza, the audience can infer that the author is at peace with the death. He says “misted and ebullient seas and cooling shores, towards Amphibia’s empiries.” The audience can feel the relaxation.
The first group of emotion in Monet’s paintings is serenity. Serenity is a state in which people are liberated from anxiety or stress of daily hassle. Monet, in general, depicts serenity in his artworks mostly involving a recreation of people amid beautiful sceneries. The subject matter is people’s facial expressions of peace while recreating in a delightful period of summer (Seitz, 1956). Facial expressions usually vary according to the situation people encounter at the moment (Dimberg, 1982).