Compare the way Remarque presents war in All Quiet on the Western Front with Dulce et Decorum est and Futility by Wilfred Owen.
by
young_hot_stalin (student)
Compare the way Remarque presents war in “All Quiet on the Western Front” with “Dulce et Decorum est” and “Futility” by Wilfred Owen.
In War Literature, an image is often created of soldiers of war serving their country with heroic grace, met by glory from their people everlasting pride. However, Remarque and Owen tell the brutal reality of the horrific journey a whole generation of soldiers had to endure. Although the effects of war have been presented with significantly different conceptions toward the English and German in British media, own and Remarque present the physical and psychological horror of death all soldiers, united in grief.
The novel “All Quiet on the Western Front” uses the first person narrator of Paul Baumer as the viewpoint of the novel. Remarque does not try to conceal the animalistic life of the solider, but instead exposes the basic level of what a man is reduced to in war: “we march up, moody or good-tempered soldiers… and become on the instant human animals”, where men become only “soldiers” serving a military purpose and therefore lose their identity. Like Owen, Remarque explores the intensity of physical and emotional pain that haunts him: “Do I walk? Have I feet still? All is usual. Only that Stanislaus Katczinsky has died.” Although Remarque cannot express with words the depth of the pain experienced by the loss of a “comrade”, he uses linguistic techniques such a rhetorical question to make the reader aware of how lost Baumer feels without his comrades, with no sense of direction or purpose, simply stating that “they are more to me than life, these voices.” In a world where all a man has is his life, once the last of his comrades dies, Baumer loses his mind and becomes “without hope” and “so alone” that he is nothing more than a shell. In this way, Remarque suggests that the psychological effects of war are only unbearable if they must be faced alone, in which case there can no longer be “peace” for the solider.
