Erich Maria Remarque All Quiet on the Western Front essays

Erich Maria Remarque All Quiet on the Western Front essays The famous novel All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque relates the terrible experience of the First World War, its disasters and cruelty, from the perspective of a nineteen year old soldier, called Paul Bamer, who fights on the front accompanied by his former schoolmates. The war is described in all its absurdity, as a crashing experience for a human being and the very title of the novel speaks about the most terrible aspect of the war- human life itself is the target of the war and thus, it becomes meaningless. The death and the lives of the thousands of people that fight in the war are unimportant in the face of the political conflict. The war is seen as a trespassing against human condition itself because the experience is unendurable and devastating for all of its participants. Almost all the characters of novel whom we become acquainted with die, but death is not the only absurdity of the war. First of all, as the characters discuss it themselves the war is absurd as a strategy for resolving a political conflict, since the people that actually die on the front in the savage experience are, for their most part, ordinary people that do not have the chance to give their opinion or take part in the conflict, and also because of fact that the war is usually the absurd and exaggerated result of a misunderstanding caused by the different politics of two nations, of which neither is completely right: Apart from its absurd causes the war has even more absurd consequences on the lives of all those involved. As the terrible experiences of Paul and his comrades are presented, all the friends of Paul, and at the end he himself die, but this is not the only consequence. The novel is intentionally related from the subjective point of view of one character, instead of merely presenting objectively the series of deaths and slaughters that take place on the western front. Seeing through the eyes of Paul we ...