The Quiet American

Remarque, author of All Quiet on the Western Front depicts Remarque’s experiences as a young German soldier that served his country during WWI. Remarque translated his experiences shortly after the war ended and his novel became a universally acknowledged war story in 1929. Although Remarque received high regards toward his novel, once readers looked deeper into his story, many started to question the message All Quiet on the Western Front was translating. After reviewing All Quiet on the…

War is not a battle between one and one’s opponent but a battle between mankind and war itself. This is depicted in Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) and Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See (2014). All Quiet on the Western Front portrays a young German soldier fighting in World War I and All the Light We Cannot See follows young blind girl in Saint-Malo and a German orphan part of the Hitler Youth in World War II. Although the two texts explore war though the…

War Trauma; The Influence it Placed on Remarque’s Writing “On the threshold of life, they faced an abyss of death…” (A.W. Wheen, as quoted in All Quiet on the Western Front) Remarque’s novel, All Quiet on the Western Front represents an idea of loss of innocence. Soldiers during this time period are at the “threshold” of their lives, as quoted by Wheen, to only face the brutal horrors of war. The horrors of the war steal the innocence away from these young men without them even knowing. These…

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…

Nationalism, the belief that one must be proud of their country no matter what it does. The novel, All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, is a story told through the eyes of a young man, Paul Bäumer, explaining his various experiences throughout his time during World War One. Whether he is under bombardment or defending the home front there are many occurrences of patriotism throughout. To begin, the soldiers follow orders regardless of what they are when they are at war.…

Across Five Aprils – A Book Response There are very few fiction books I enjoy reading; I like to read history books, especially ones that relate to WWII. However, Irene Hunt’s Across Five Aprils is a fictional book based on the American Civil War that I thoroughly enjoyed reading. The book takes the reader on a five year journey of the Creighton family and how they had to come to terms with the impact and effects of a war-torn family. Across Five Aprils tells the story of a young boy named…

English, American, Hungarian, Austrian, Bulgarian or from the Ottoman Empire. They all had the same experiences while at war. There were differences depending where they were placed, but the fundamental characteristics were the same. There were a total of 17 million dead and 20 million wounded; the survivors were left to live with the effects of being dehumanized because of all the death they saw. Within three great works about WWI, “Suicide in the Trenches” by Siegfried Sassoon, All Quiet on…

All Quiet on the Western Front is written by Erich Maria Remarque about what a soldier truly went through in WWI. A general background of the war is that it was between allied powers of UK, France, Belgium, Serbia and Russia against central powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary. This book shows the German side fighting on the western front against France’s front line because of the Schlieffen plan. I will be looking at how in this novel WWI was depicted as a gruesome war that in order to survive…

In the novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque gives the first hand account of Paul Bäumer who enlists in the German Army with his classmates during World War I. World War I was a very transformative event, not just for the nations involved in the war, but for the rest of human history as well. World War I is one of the greatest wars in history as it brought about a whole new way of fighting and warfare. It changed so many aspects of how soldiers fought. Many technological…

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,…