All Quiet On The Western Front
...by Erich Maria Remarque. The novel is about the deadliness and brutality of World War I. It’s overall message is that war can destroy a soldier’s life, leaving it hard for them to return to the life they lived before enlistment.
War brings out the worst in people, it changes the way they act normally, and how they approach situations. War has a false front, that it is full of heroes and people doing remarkable things for there country. There is a lot of patriotism involved. What many people don’t know, is that peoples lives on the front, are terrible.
One of the main messages in the book is that soldiers who fought, cannot return to the everyday lives they lived before the war started. A huge part in the book that boldly shows my point is the part where Paul returns home to see his family. For him, it was an awkward situation, he did not know what do do with himself, especially when he ran into the other soldier in the streets. The difference from the front lines, to his small town was too much for Paul, he didn’t like it at all.
"But a sense of strangeness will not leave me, I cannot feel at
home amongst these things” Paul said that when he went home to visit hisMother..
All Quiet on the Western Front also shows how war turns soldiers into
animals and takes away the human side of them. Paul says that war
makes us savages in the following quote,"Just as we turn into animals
when we go up to the line...so we turn into wags and loafers when we
are resting...We want to live at any price...". The quote shows how
soldiers are like savage animals and they will ignore all rules to
survive. They have to do anything to survive so it is almost like
they lose them selves at the line.
The books leads us to think that war is...
View Full Essay