Remarque Through The Eyes Of Paul Baumer example essay topic

All Quiet on the Western Front is a historical war novel written by Erich Maria Remarque. It is set during World War I on the battlefields on the western front of the war, between France and Germany. The book explores the lives and deaths of men who fight the war and how it tears them apart. The story is told through the eyes of Paul Baumer, a young man who fights for the German army and had joined with a few of his class mates before the war.

From the very beginning of the book we see the horrors of war and how it is tearing apart the young men who fight alongside Paul Baumer. The most important idea Erich Maria Remarque wants the reader to know is that war is not romantic. War is evil and inhuman and the pain associated with war both mentally and physically will change the soldiers who fight in it forever. Paul Baumer, the books protagonist shows you the horrors of the War through his eyes and lays out Remarques ideas as Paul's world falls apart around him and nothing becomes worth living for.

This first person view is very effective in structuring a very deep, dark and sickening that truly pulls the reader in and gets Remarques points across sharply. During World War I, there were 70,000,000 men and women in uniform, of that number one-half were either killed, wounded or became prisoners of war. Paul Baumer and his comrades, his school friends, Mueller, Kemmerich, Be hm and Kropp are all part of that total in the end of the war, but Paul Baumer wants us to know that he and his friends were dead long before any bullets pierced their skin. In the last battle scene of the book, Paul and his one surviving friend, Kat, are fighting in a storm swept front. "Our hands our earth, our bodies clay and our eyes pools of rain. We do not know whether we still live".

(Remarque 287). Paul Baumer's view of the Great War embraces the direct feelings of the author, Erich Remarque's own ideas and views about war. Paul Baumer is Remarque's self image, the experiences that Remarque faced in fighting the war himself, it is all portrayed through Paul Baumer. Throughout the novel, Paul's inner personality is contrasted with the way the war and the front forces him to act and feel. His memories of the time before the war show that he was once a very different man from the despairing soldier who now narrates the novel. Paul is a compassionate and sensitive young man; before the war he loved his family and wrote poetry.

Because of the horror of the war and the anxiety it induces, Paul, like other soldiers, learns to disconnect his mind from his feelings, keeping his emotions at bay in order to preserve his sanity and survive. This dark passage illustrates the psychological process of how a soldier disconnects oneself from emotions to survive at any cost. We want to live at any price; so we cannot burden ourselves with feelings, which, though they may be ornamental enough in peacetime, would be out of place here. Kemmerich is dead, Have West hus is dying...

Martens has no legs anymore, Meyer is dead, Max is dead, Beyer is dead, Hammering is dead... it is a damnable business, but what has it to do with us now-we live. (Remarque 139) This shows Remarque's knowledge of the yearning to survive in the War, but with all the death surrounding Paul Baumer it just seemed hopeless. All his classmates were dead, he could not talk about the war back home, he did not believe in what the war was going on for, Paul had nothing to hope for but his own life. As a result, the compassionate young man becomes unable to mourn his dead comrades, unable to feel at home among his family, unable to express his feelings about the war or even talk about his experiences, unable to remember the past fully, and unable to conceive of a future without war. He also becomes a "human animal", capable of relying on animal instinct to kill and survive in battle.

But because Paul is extremely sensitive, he is somewhat less able than many of the other soldiers to detach himself completely from his feelings, and there are several moments in the book when he feels himself pulled down by emotion. These feelings indicate the extent to which war has programmed Paul to cut himself off from feeling, as when he says, with devastating understatement, "Parting from my friend Albert Kropp was very hard. But a man gets used to that sort of thing in the army". Remarque is showing the reader that a soldier can never reclaim what they lose in war; the loss of innocence and life all around them devastates the human soul. Paul's experience is intended to represent the experience of a whole generation of men, the so-called lost generation-men who went straight from childhood to fighting in World War I, often as adolescents. Paul frequently considers the past and the future from the perspective of his entire generation, noting that, when the war ends, he and his friends will not know what to do, as they have learned to be adults only while fighting the war.

The longer that Paul survives the war and the more that he hates it, the less certain he is that life will be better for him after it ends. This anxiety arises from his belief that the war will have ruined his generation, will have so eviscerated his mind and his friends' minds that they will always be dead even if they don't die. As Paul prophesies about if society would accept the soldiers after the war he comes up with this grave picture, .".. Men will not understand us-for the generation that grew up before us... the war will be forgotten-and the generation that has grown up after us will be strange to us and push us aside... the years will pass and in the end we shall fall into ruin". (Remarque 294) There is truth in Paul's statement, it can be used as a great foreshadowing of Remarque's idea of what is next in store for the war torn country of Germany, the country shortly after the war does fall into ruin and in this Remarque uses Paul as a political voice against war itself.

When he looks ahead to his future and sees that it is grim, Paul is relieved by his death: "his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come". (Remarque 296) The war becomes not merely a traumatic experience or a hardship to be endured but something that actually transforms a human life into irreversible, endless suffering. Remarque, through the eyes of Paul Baumer wants to tell the reader that war has no place in the human mind. All the grave horrors that one human could possible take are all illustrated through Paul's experiences. Remarque is making a statement that wars not only kills body, but also mind and soul. The war destroys Paul Baumer's soul long before it kills his body.