The narrative style is important as the first person of Paul allows us to see things from his point of view, enabling the reader to identify with a single eye witness account. Pauls start on the Western frontline gives us a good understanding of his thoughts and feelings about war, which can be immature and bewildering at times. As Paul is still in his teens, he enters the war with enthusiasm and is unprepared for the total obliteration of both his comrades and country’s military aims. As a reader we understand that he is a typical teenager and his account is all the more damaging. We see him lose his ideas and his own fragile hold on life. In many ways Paul is Remarque’s mouthpiece. At the end of the novel the story briefly adopts a third person following Paul’s untimely death. He is anonymous and impersonal, showing that Paul was a mere “cannon fodder.” He is not respected as a person in his own right by his country and his death is unimportant. The report for the day of his death is brief, “All quiet on the western front” and the fact that this is the title of the novel clearly conveys the author’s views of war here, which are unfair and unjust.
Throughout the war, Paul and his comrades became more and more distanced to the humanity they once knew through the use of symbolism. Chapter one shows the specific dehumanization of soldiers by the way that the men deal with the boots of their dying comrade, Kemmerich. They were undoubtedly stripped from a down English airman before being passed on when Kemmerich dies. Muller, a fellow comrade, eyes the boot while Kemmerich is dying.
“Muller is delighted by the sight of them; he matches their soles against his own clumsy boots… ‘Will you leave them with us?’ Kemmerich doesn’t want to. They are his most prized possession.”
This strong symbolism of the boots shows the worthlessness of life in the war. It is clear that the boots represent the need for the men to lose sensitivity to be completely practical in order to survive, and which they now no longer associated inheriting the boots with having something of a deceased friend, but with having a new pair boots. The boots seem to foreshadow death as every successive man to own them are succumb to a violent death afterwards. This symbolism reveals to the reader how ruthless the soldiers must be to survive and also how poorly the soldiers were equipped for battle.
As the novel continues, Remarque shows the reader how ruthless and dehumanised the soldiers have become due to the tragedies of war through use of imagery. In chapter four there is a reoccurring imagery of the soldiers being compared to wild animals and beasts. Paul and his comrades are assigned to lay barbed wire at the front line, and extremely dangerous task in which they are bombarded with shells. Paul goes on to describe the heavy bombardment and the reaction the soldiers have due to their demanding and vicious training in the army.
“We reach the zone where the front begins and become on the instant human animals.”
“At the first droning sound of the shells we rush back, in one part of our being, a thousand years.”
“By the animal instinct that is awakened in us we are led and protected.”
“We have become wild beasts. We do not fight, we defend ourselves against annihilation.”
This continued use of animal imagery not only shows the reader that war has robbed the soldiers of their sensitivity, compassion and creativity but all qualities that help make us civilised. In order for the soldiers to survive the traumas of war, it is necessary for the soldiers to sacrifice the sympathetic parts of their minds and depend fully on basic animal instinct. In this way, he suggests that battles are also animalistic and inhumane, a large aspect of the devastation that the war wreaks on a soldier’s sanity. This effectively gains the readers interest further as the soldier’s attitude towards war is shocking although needed and would be dangerous in a typical society.
The novel goes on to show how lost and ‘out of sync’ the soldiers really are if returned to society from the war. In chapter six Paul goes home on leave to which he sees straight away how his experiences of the war have permanently affected him. As he enters his hometown he realizes how his life will never be the same again. A terrible gap between his present and past and also himself and his parents exists. Here he sees his past as, “A vast inapprehensible melancholy…they are past , they belong to another world that is gone from us… and even if these scenes of our youth were given back to us we would hardly know what to do … I believe we are lost.” At home on leave amongst his books and childhood papers he realizes that he can never find his way back to the earlier Paul. Too much has happened at the front line for him to believe in human beings and compassion. Even with his family he realizes that life will never be the same again.
“A sense of strangeness will not leave me; I cannot feel at home amongst these things. There is my mother, there is my sister, there my case of butterflies, and there the mahogany piano-but I am not myself there. There is a distance, a veil between us.” Paul’s experience in the war and at the frontline has completely removed any humanity and compassion he once had which has made him feel alienated from society and home. He is too familiar with being around death and sadness that any love or compassion he had for his family is now removed. This effectively keeps the readers interest as this loss of humanity seems strange but is very intriguing and personal as the novel is in first person.
In conclusion, “All quiet on the Western Front” by Erich Maria Remarque is a novel which follows the day to day routines of a German soldier in World War 1 and how the horrors and traumas of war can affect a soldier mentally and physically, removing their basic human nature entirely. Remarque effectively shows how war dehumanises soldiers and makes readers manage to sympathise with them through the use of symbolism, imagery and first person perspective.