All Quiet On The Western Front Rhetorical Analysis

Millions of young men have gone through life-altering experiences in their time in World War I. In Erich Maria Remarque’s novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, Paul Bäumer, a 19-year-old German soldier, narrates his personal memoirs of this war. As he is forced to mature from a young boy to an experienced warrior in order to survive, Paul is left permanently scarred from the throes of war and his attitude towards life is forever changed. Paul is used as an example for all of the young soldiers in the war who go through very similar experiences and are left in the same state of mind as him, isolated and stripped away of character. By employing juxtaposition to contrast Paul’s mindset before and after the war, Remarque demonstrates how the mental health of the World War I soldiers is damaged because of the …show more content…
As time passes, each of the soldiers slowly loses his sense of self, specifically seen when Paul and Albert, a fellow soldier, cannot seem to recognize themselves in a regular life in the future after the war. Kropp then interprets this as a loss of preparedness because the war had ruined them for everything. Paul seems to agree as he reminisces, “We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war” (Remarque 88). Paul juxtaposes his innocent youth with his transformation into a soldier. In this context, the use of the phrase “we believe in war” gives the impression that the only thing soldiers can “love” and believe in is the life of war and the primitive instinct of survival. To change their frame of mind, they have to “shoot it to pieces”-which means