All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque poses many questions throughout the story including why an enemy soldier can cause grief. The French soldier Gérard Duval is significant to All Quiet on the Western Front because he changes the perception of the enemy by being an idea, an almost lifeless body, and a single name that all cause grief without speaking a single word. When Gérard Duval is first introduced, he is plunging into the trench that Paul Baumer is in. He is not portrayed as a person at first, instead being “steps [that] hasten over [him]...a body [that] falls over [him]” because he is fearful of his life and soon after, Paul stabs him without thinking about who he is(Remarque 216). Remarque uses non-specific nouns
In chapter six it starts out with the men discussing a possible offensive against them, meanwhile all of them are in the trenches which are in horrible shape, which are filed with huge rats. The soldiers are all tired and worn down and their leader ,Kat, shows it in his face as well. One night after an earth bomb shakes their trench area a young recruit that seems uneasy and yells at Paul then walks out of the trenches, this showed the toll war does on a man. The same day the men are attacked by the French and attacked bad, Paul described it and says “ We have become wild beasts. We do not fight, we defend ourselves from annihilation”.
1. What have you read this week? How has the plot progressed? Write a 6-8 sentence summary of the novel so far. Robin and his crew continue to go town to town helping town memeber who have lost everything or children who have sustained injury.
What were the effects of the war on the soldiers who fought in it? The effects of war on these soldiers’ lives, had a very negative impact. Some of the effects were a lost generation, scarring the soldiers for life, causing them to lose their innocence, and to take other people’s lives. I’m going to synthesize and analyzes these three situations; in All Quiet on the Western the Front the main character is Paul Baumer, the movie Gallipoli the main character is Archie Hamilton, and the poem They. All of these situations are about what one certain soldier experience in World War 1.
Fighting in WWI on the Western Front was a brutal, bloody, and fatal battle where very few made it out alive. In “All Quiet on the Western Front” by Erich Maria Remarque the most compelling complex character in my opinion was Katczinsky. The leader of Paul Baumer's group, Katczinsky, expressed great wisdom and had an alluring sixth sense while commanding the troops. Katczinsky was overwhelmingly accurate when it came to bombardments, he would tell the soldiers, “I can feel it in my bones” (Remarque 53).
All Quiet on the Western Front written by Erich Maria Remarque is a story of a young man named Paul Bäumer who volunteers to be a soldier in the German army during World War One. Being at a very young age Bäumer, and three of his friends whom also enlisted to the German army from the same school he attended, felt proud when enlisting “we were a class of twenty young men, many of whom proudly shaved for the first time before going to the barracks” (AQOTWF p.21). Very soon, however, Bäumer and the young men he enlisted with begin to feel indifferent and embittered of being in the army “At first astonished, then embittered, and finally indifferent.” (AQOTWF p.21/22). Joining the army for Bäumer changed the way he felt about everything he knew in the past, and the way he thought of the people who stayed back home.
Erich Remarque, author of the novel All Quiet on the Western Front, presents a true story of a soldier throughout World War I. At the young age of 19, Paul Bäumer voluntarily enters the draft to fight for his home country, Germany. Throughout the war, Paul disconnects his mind from his feelings, keeping his emotions away from the bitter reality he is experiencing. This helps him survive mentally throughout the course of the war. The death of Paul 's friend Kemmerich forces him to cover his grief, “My limbs move supplely, I feel my joints strong, I breathe the air deeply. The night lives, I live.”
No one wants to go to war. The presence of war in a country can destroy the economy and any stability there was. One of the more noticeable effects is the negative impact war has on the availability of food, which is harmful for both civilians and soldiers. It is possible to see this through the lenses of All Quiet on the Western Front and A Long Way Gone, as well as their real-world counterparts World War I and the Sierra Leone civil war.
Personal Change Through Experience People in their lives are pushed, challenged, met with difficult decisions and go through strenuous ordeals which will form and develop their beliefs, values and how they perceive the world. The novels All Quiet on the Western Front and Purple Hibiscus share these similar themes through the novels. All Quiet on the Western Front, written by Erich Maria Remarque, is a War novel about the physical and mental challenges of a young German man who volunteers to join up into the military to fight in World War One. Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a fiction novel involving a young girl, her brother, her abusive, demanding father who controls her and her family’s life, the stress and pain it brings
The book All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque gives us a good understanding of what war was like for the people fighting on the front. When reading this book people can get a front hand experience of what it is like being in battle. Remarque wrote this book so well that often times you picture yourself actually with Paul and all his friends. The one thing you specifically get to see is how humanity affects warfare. Humanity affects our decisions in warfare because humans are selfish, have fear, and seek revenge.
The First World War was a lengthy and brutal affair that claimed the lives of over 17 million individuals. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, its effects were equally as ferocious on the intellectual front, where it marked a turning point in the clash of European intellectual values. Philosophers such as Nietzsche had already challenged established institutions of Positivistic thinking toward knowledge and progress; however, his movement lacked widespread support. It was the disaster of WWI that accelerated their movement by inspiring culture-wide undermining of prior intellectual beliefs through newfound uncertainty: authors such as Erich Remarque and Vera Brittain drew upon sudden doubt underscored by the war to completely reverse prior thinking by breaking down pre-war notions of intellectual
Millions of people have gone through life-altering experiences in their time in World War I. In Erich Maria Remarque’s novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, Paul Bäumer, a 19-year-old German soldier, narrates his personal memoirs of this war. He describes the mental change and suffering he goes through as he is forced to mature from a young boy to a soldier in order to survive, leaving him permanently scarred from the throes of war. By employing juxtaposition to contrast Paul’s mindset, before and after the war, Remarque demonstrates how the mental health of the World War I soldiers is damaged because of the abrupt loss of their youth, leaving them in a state of survival and mental instability.
PTSD Then and Now PTSD is an issue that many characters have to face in All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. PTSD stands for post-traumatic stress disorder and is a recognized mental illness today. During World War I, when this book takes place, PTSD was not a known illness. Because of this, in the past it was harder for soldiers to cope with the stress and anxiety of coming home from war than it is now. It still is nowhere close to easy for soldiers today, but there are treatment options available for soldiers with PTSD to make their homecoming easier.
All Quiet on The Western Front shows the dependence the soldiers convey to one another. For example, Kat, “Kat appears I think I must have been dreaming he has two loaves of bread under his arm” (Remarque 39). Without Kat the soldiers would be starving all the soldiers realize this and appreciate him for being there. Kat has the ability to find food in the middle of nowhere. The soldiers also depend on each other for comfort.
In chapter 9 Paul has ruptured to the front, and finds Kat, Müller, Tjaden, and Kropp are still alive and are ok. Paul and his friends think that if thirty people would have said “no” the war wouldn’t have happened and they would have been there. Paul also volunteers to go into No Man’s Land to gather info about the enemy. Paul gets lost on his way back and finds shelter in a shell hole, after a while a soldier go into the same hole and Paul is forced to kill him. It was to bright outside for Paul to make his way back to camp so is has to stay there until night with the dead body.
Erich Maria Remarque was a man who had lived through the terrors of war, serving since he was eighteen. His first-hand experience shines through the text in his famous war novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, which tells the life of young Paul Bäumer as he serves during World War 1. The book was, and still is, praised to be universal. The blatant show of brutality, and the characters’ questioning of politics and their own self often reaches into the hearts of the readers, regardless of who or where they are. Brutality and images of war are abundant in this book, giving the story a feeling of reality.