Point of View All Quiet on the Western Front is in Paul Baumer’s point of view. This book tells us the story of Paul on the battlefield during World War I. Paul explains his pain and terror throughout the book and his point of view makes us feel his pain and terror along with him. He talks about his view on war and how he thinks it is pointless. He says that only the state gains from war not the people in the state, referring to the soldiers and their families. Writing the book in Paul’s point of view makes the readers understand the severity of the war and the effects it has on everyone.
Setting All Quiet on Western Front is set on the front lines during World War I. Paul and his company are sent to the front lines where everything is
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We find out Paul and his friends volunteered to fight because becoming a soldier was thought to be a great and honorable title to hold during that time in Germany. Paul and his friends resent their decision and their elders after they go to training camp. There the are trained by Corporal Himmelstoss who is known for his brutal tactics. Almost half of their men are dead and new recruits are brought in. Paul and his friends help out the new recruits because it turns out men are dying faster than they can be trained so the new soldiers have no knowledge of fighting on the front lines. Now food is scarce too, but Kat is very clever and finds food for Paul and their friends. Paul is given leave and returns home where he feels like he no longer belongs. The soldiers are his new family and he is afraid they will be dead before he returns to the front. After his leave, he goes to a training camp where he empathizes with the Russian prisoners. When he returns to the front he gets separated and is stuck in a shell hole with a French soldier. Paul is forced to kill the soldiers and feels guilty because, like him, the soldier has a family and friends who will miss him. After he reunites with his friends, they are sent to guard supplies and there they break into a house to feast and do as they please. At that time they were attacked and Paul and Kropp end up at a catholic hospital. Paul recovers and goes back to the front. By now Paul is all alone since all of his friends have died are no longer fighting in the front lines. Even Kat has died. Paul has nothing to live for anymore and ends up dying near the end of the
Like the concept of survival of the fittest, it is essential for the soldiers to have an animal instinct to survive on the battlefield. Many moments are shown in which the soldiers become two faced, changing from good-mannered and soft soldier to animal - like characteristics. Paul informs us that they only way to survive in battle, is to block away all your emotions, if not, it would drive you insane. Another aspect as to the book’s anti-war sentiment, is how Remarque describes the consequences of war, the loss of the young life. Paul's generation was known as the "Iron Youth", which was a group of young boys who enlisted and fought in the war as a way of showing gratitude for their country, Germany, but his age group is lost because
During All Quiet on the Western Front, Paul, a compassionate man, is forced to lose an aspect of his humanity, by hiding his emotions and disconnecting his emotions from his feelings. As a result, he becomes unable to feel at ease when he reunited with his family, and the idea of comfort becomes incomprehensible to him. When he visits his frail, sickly mother, she offers him whortleberries and potato cakes; however, Paul could not “feel at home amongst these things” (Remarque 160). Despite all of these comforts presented to Paul, he cannot shake the looming presence of the war, and all of the horrors that come with it. Once a caring man who loved his family
The ruthless killing brings a toll on the people who will remember that the enemies are men just like them, as Paul does when he instantly regrets his actions, saying that he would not kill him if he could redo the situation. Thus Paul sees value in being a coward, as he thinks it would be more courageous not to kill him than to go by the standards he learns. The German soldiers train as if they were animals acting upon their instincts to do so, which bears similarity to the human nature of war. Paul is at the stage where he lacks any hope for the war and does not see the light at the end of the tunnel. It is in the winter and at the time when Paul is so accustomed to the war that it is just another day for him.
Throughout the story Paul shows that he cares about his comrades by protecting them from the dangers of war, and he also displays that he will guide them in war. Paul uses his skills of intelligence to guide his team in the trenches and at the front, and he passes on his knowledge and tricks of war to the new recruits. Not many soldiers have all of these qualities, which makes Paul stand out more than his comrades. Even today some men don't express the passion and leadership Paul shows in All Quiet on the Western Front, which brings up the fact that the war needs more men like Paul. To sum up, Paul is an honest and true man who will always be there for his comrades when needed, and he is a man the troops are proud to say is a patriotic
In the book, Paul often cares more than anyone else. He cares for his friends and even the enemy. “I take out my cigarettes, break each one in half and give them to the Russians” (Remarque, Erich. All Quiet on the Western Front). During the war, the Russians were enemies with Germany.
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.
In addition, Paul was injured in the book and goes home and stays with her family while he recovers. He is no longer able to relate to his family, since it is very difficult to think and have emotions and at the same time with much death all around him in the war. There is much talk of how he and his friends do not think about deep things, but just think about eating and silly things. His father and people over all his people want me to tell them stories of war and hate Paul because their experiences are horrible. Paul has just returned to the fight and basically everyone in the book is wounded and dies.
In order to emphasize the degree to which the soldiers in World War I changed emotionally, Paul juxtaposes the innocence of his youth with a primal instinct of desperate survival that forms from the brutality of the war. As time passes, each of the soldiers slowly loses his sense of self, specifically seen when Bäumer and Kropp, a fellow soldier, cannot seem to recognize themselves in a regular life in the future after the war. Kropp then interprets this as a loss of preparedness because of war. Paul seems to agree as he reminisces, “We were eighteen
"Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy? If we threw away these rifles and uniforms you could be my brother just like Kat and Albert (Remarque 223)". Comradeship among soldiers is a major theme throughout the novel, "All Quiet on the Western Front" because the soldiers knew each other before the war, protected each other during combat, and can relate to one another without having to literally speak. This story 's theme shows comradeship because Paul and the other soldiers were in class together before joining the war. In the beginning of the novel Paul introduces his friends he went to school with before going to war with. "
At the end Paul realizes that everything flashes before his eyes after all his friends had died,” I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how people are set against one another…” (Remarque, 263). The main character, Paul reaches the point where he understands that he has no knowledge of the meaning of life. This quote gives a better understanding of the factors of the war, death and fear and the role they play for the comrades. We are reminded the short amount of time most soldier survive, in Paul’s company the initial number of soldiers was one hundred eighty,” Second Company—with difficulty a line, a short line trudges off into the morning.
Everyone in the town kept asking Paul about the war. The mayor and Paul dad had kept asking him questions, and Paul was getting angry with his dad and the mayor, because he did not want to talk about it. Paul had also really missed his friends and was worried about them and hoped they would be okay when Paul had returned. I did not realize that Paul did not like that subject to be brought up, because in his head he sees many terrible scenes going on and many bombs being very close to him. Paul wanted to spend time with his mom, because he knew that she would be dying soon of cancer.
The more fighting there is the worse Paul and the men’s moral become. Paul can not see an end to the war and even if it were to end, he doesn’t believe that he can ever return back to normal. He experiences this when he first visits home during the war. “A terrible feeling of foreignness suddenly rises up in me. I can not find my way back, I am shut out though I entreat earnestly and put forth all my strength.”
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.
[…] Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy? If we threw away these rifles and this uniform you could be my brother just like Kat and Albert." (Chapter 9) In this quote Paul realizes how wrong he has been this whole time, he says if they were not in the war, both men could have possibly been close friends for all they
The war novel All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque depicts one protagonist, Paul, as he undergoes a psychological transformation. Paul plays a role as a soldier fighting in World War I. His experiences during the war are not episodes the average person would simply experience. Alternatively, his experiences allow him to develop into a more sophisticated individual. Remarque illustrates these metamorphic experiences to expose his theme of the loss of not only people’s lives but also innocence and tranquility that occurs in war.