"All Quiet on the Western Front" September 21

The novel “All Quiet on the Western Front” was written for an audience that is roughly our age. The main idea, I believe that Remarque was trying to get across to the readers is that life can change in a short matter of time; everything we once felt, knew, and believed in can change when a traumatic event takes place, like war in the case of Paul Baümer.

In the book, Paul is considered part of the “Lost Generation” because his generation of men was taken into the war all over the globe but with different uniforms against each other. Most of the young men did not make it out of the war alive and toward the end of the book he states that there was only a small fraction of his class left when the end of the war was in sight. Erich Maria Remarque tried to explain through vivid mental pictures that at that point in time many faces and people were lost. Even those who survived lost themselves almost completely.

Then, when Paul comes back from his leave he is not sent up to the frontlines right away. He has a couple of weeks of training to do and then is back where he began. Once he has returned to his position, he is very close to enemy lines and has to lie in a puddle of muddy water and pretend he is dead so nobody attacks him. At this point when the French man falls into the puddle and Paul attacks him to save himself, it was then that Paul lost all of his senses. The author shown us that war takes the sensitivity and emotions are toyed with while witnessing and participating in wartime. Once there was a face and story to the man he left dying, Paul Baümer started to lose his mind. He could not process what happened and how it was “normal” and all of his friends had fought face-to-face and went through the same thing.

To conclude, reading Remarque’s novel was not only entertaining but he also got his message across to me. I do not understand the war(s) and what people went and go through any better, although he has painted a series of pictures in my head as to what it possibly looked like for a good portion of those involved.