María Elena Marqués

authors write, they typically create literature about experiences they have had; or they may write characters whom they associate themselves with. The practice of doing this is extremely evident in the stories All Quiet on The Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque and For Whom The Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway. Both men have experience in which they write these novels from. From the age of eighteen Remarque was conscripted into the German Army to fight in World War I, while Ernest Hemingway…

In his book, All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque is characterizing a young generation who lost everything in the Great War. He describes how Paul the main character, and his comrades perish one by one to the brutality of the war. The author describes how they become more dehumanized, as they fight endlessly for nothing. Because in many of the fiercest battles of the war, there is hardly any territory won or lost, yet the casualties are huge. Finally, the book has an anti-war…

“War does not determine who is right- only who is left,” is a quote by Bertrand Russell. This spectrum expresses the casualties of war. In other words, Russell means war is used as an outlet to define a “winner”, or in this case, someone who is right. The veiled truth is that there are no true winners of war when comparing the damage created and the lives lost. Looking at war through that perspective, John F. Kennedy, among others, also agreed. Kennedy believed if mankind didn’t put an end to…

flourished on the nationalism in the early 1900’s of its people, ready to encounter an attack at any moment and any time. People forget the decision of war until they are in the flame of its fire. In the novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque explains his war experience in World War 1 through a character, Paul Bumer—a kind and sensitive man. While in school, he used to write poems. Paul’s teacher brainwashed him and other students. He convinced them, by the idea of glory,…

All Quiet on the Western Front, directed by Lewis Milestone, is a harrowing Anti-War movie depicting the horrors of World War I through the eyes of German schoolboys turned recruits. It stars popular actors from the time period, such as Louis Wolheim, Lew Ayres, and John Wray. It follows the life of a young soldier and his friends who voluntarily joined the war because of how gratifying and heroic their professor made it seem as he pressured them to fulfill their “patriotic duty”. They witnessed…

Herbert Hoover once said, “Older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die” (War Quotes). Erich Remarque, the author of All Quiet on the Western Front, wrote the novel to show parts of war that one can only understand with a similar struggle, including the cowardice of the older generation, the horrors of war, and the effects war has on the soldiers. War is hard to understand by those who have not experienced it. “Yet paradoxically, we are greater removed from the fighting now…

The von Trapps never saw much of the huge profits the Sound of Music made nor had any creative input, because Maria sold the film rights to German producers and inadvertently signed away her rights in the process. The Germans then sold the rights to American Broadway producers Hayward and Halliday, who turned the story into a musical starring Halliday’s broadway…

In “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” the usage of metaphors and imagery throughout Jarrell’s poem helps the reader understand the overall theme of how war can cause death and wreak havoc in a young person, how can be a struggle for the soldier’s family, and how disappointing it is when a man doesn’t reach his full potential in life because of being forced to go to war. Jarrell uses key words throughout his poem to show us how war can be a terrible thing, especially for the young people…

Thousands of people join our military and risk their lives to fight for their country. After many years of fighting in war soldiers are no longer who they used to be. When they return home they are looked at, treated badly, and are not given the treatment needed to recover. The struggles and obstacles these veterans face on their journey home and once they arrive forever face. In the epic poem, Odyssey by Homer, it shows the obstacles a soldier has to face on their journey. Odysseus and his men…

Joe Haldeman once said, “No person can escape Einsteinian relativity, and no soldier or veteran can escape the trauma of war's dislocation” (“Joe Haldeman Quotes.”). This means that the trauma of war is as inescapable as Einstein’s laws of relativity. The authors of these books explore the inevitability of war’s trauma throughout their works. In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, the authors use the rhetorical devices of imagery, similes,…