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duty. The

wounded horses

The upturned

graves.

-

5 Insubordination

to Himmelstoss. Lack

of post-war goals.

The goose incident.

-

6 Days upon days

of trench

warfare.

Company down to

32 men. Westhus

wounded.

-

7 Paul home on The evening with

leave. the French girls.

Mittelstaedt's

humiliation by

Kantorek.

-

8 Paul guarding the

Russian prisoners

of war.

-

9 The Kaiser's visit. Paul's killing

of Duval in the

trench.

-

10 The hospital. The supply dump.

Kropp left behind.

-

11 Starvation, lack

of supplies,

demoralization.

Loss of

Detering,

Muller, Leer,

Kat.

-

12 Paul's death on

a quiet day.

-

Remarque's use of contrast, gives a new meaning to the phrase

"theater of war." He keeps us moving between the trenches and the rest

of the world. Even if Paul's hometown is suffering from war shortages,

life there is safe and comfortable compared with the front. Even the

hospital, filled with wounded, offers clean sheets and regular food-

luxuries unimaginable at the front lines. These contrasts help us to

understand what is happening to the emotional life of the young

soldier.

The above chart will help you see more clearly how Remarque uses

contrasts. The first part of All Quiet dwells on what happened at

home, far from the front, and what it is like near the front. The

middle chapters actually take us to the front and then pull us back

several times- to civilian life, to a camp behind the lines, to a

supply dump, to a hospital- so that we too feel the shock when we

return, in the final chapters, to the unrelieved pressures of the

front.

Finally, Remarque's style includes irony. We fully appreciate how

little value is attached to a single human life by 1918 when we read

the army report on the progress of the war on the day Paul dies:

"All quiet on the Western Front."

POINT_OF_VIEW

POINT OF VIEW (RALLVIEW)

-

Stories usually are told from the first person or the third person

point of view. We get these terms from grammar. "I love" is a first

person structure, "you love" is second person, and "he (or she) loves"

is third person. A story is told in the first person when the narrator

says that I or we are doing thus-and-so: someone actually in the story

is telling it. A third person story uses the he or they approach; some

unnamed person outside the story is observing others doing something.

Except for the very last two paragraphs of the book, All Quiet on

the Western Front is written from the first person point of view.

The story is being told by someone who is actually in it- Paul Baumer-

not by some invisible outsider. Remarque does switch to third person

in the last two paragraphs for an obvious reason: Paul cannot report

his own death.

First person narration always has both advantages and disadvantages.

A big advantage is that we tend to identify with the main character.

In All Quiet we feel as if we are right there with Paul,

experiencing what he is seeing and hearing and feeling. We almost

think his thoughts, share his ideas. First person narration makes

the whole story seem direct and real and honest.

On the other hand, first person narration also limits us to

knowing and seeing only what the narrator- in this case, Paul- knows

and sees. We get other news and views and opinions only as he

filters them and reports them to us.

In the case of All Quiet, Paul is young and immature. Until he

enlisted, he had never experienced real pain or tragedy in his life.

Older people generally know from experience that human beings can

survive incredible pain and still find meaning in life. Paul hasn't

had any time to gain that kind of experience to sustain him. Therefore

it's asking quite a bit to have us accept, from him, whole theories

about war and life and the nature of human beings. Still, whatever

Paul might lack in age or experience is balanced for us by the honesty

and sensitivity we see in him.

Over all, then, in All Quiet on the Western Front, the advantages of

first person narration outweigh the disadvantages. There is a

perfect fit of first person point of view with what Remarque wanted to

say about World War I- that it destroyed a whole generation of the

young. How better to show us that than to let us experience the war

through the eyes of a young soldier?

FORM

FORM (RALLFORM)

-

When critics use the word form to discuss a novel, they sometimes

mean its overall style and structure- the elements already presented

under that heading in this guidebook. Another meaning of form is the

category a novel falls into- how it should be classified, what kind of

fiction it is.

You yourself use from in this narrow, second meaning when you say

that you like to read mysteries or westerns or romances or some

other kind of story. But if someone asked you what kind of book All

Quiet is, you would find that it just doesn't fit standard

classifications. You might say it's a war story- but it's a lot more

than that. It's also a story about a boy turning into a

disillusioned adult, or perhaps a story telling society that it

ought to eliminate the great evil of war. The standard categories

simply do not express all that.

The best term for a novel in which everything depends on a

specific war setting is historical novel. Charles Dickens' A Tale of

Two Cities, set during the French Revolution, is an example. All Quiet

does happen during World War I, but Remarque doesn't dwell on

historical details such as names of battles. Instead he concentrates

much more on what any war does to people.

Usually a novel in which a young person matures by passing through

some kind of crisis is called a novel of formation or a novel of

initiation. This fits Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, in

which Henry Fleming starts out as a naive boy, expecting war to be

glorious, only to find how terrible it is. It also fits All Quiet to

some extent, but not as well- by the time the book begins, Paul has

already become disillusioned enough to call 70 deaths a

"miscalculation."

If you see All Quiet as a novel telling society something wrong

ought to be changed- in this case, war- you could try sociological

novel, but again the label seems somehow off. It fits a book against

slavery like Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin but seems to

express only one element of All Quiet.

All in all, form as classification is simply too narrow and

artificial for this book. With All Quiet, you are better off using the

word form in its broad senses meaning style and structure. All Quiet

can be described as a novel made up of dramatic scenes, vivid

language, and a series of contrasting episodes that make us feel how

totally destructive war is.

AUTHORS_NOTE

THE STORY (RALLSTOR)

-

AUTHOR'S NOTE

-

Remarque begins his book with a note before the first chapter. In it

he says that his book "is to be neither an accusation nor a

confession, and least of all an adventure," but rather an account of a

generation of young men who were destroyed by the war- World War I-

"even though they may have escaped its shells."

What does he mean? Biography and history tell us his situation. By

1929 when his book came out, World War I had been over for ten

years, but it was still affecting people like him and his friends, who

had gone from the schoolroom right into the trenches. Many of them

survived, but they felt as if a shadow still hung over their lives.

After all that time, they still hadn't been able to sort out their

feelings about the war.

Remarque says that he doesn't want to accuse or blame anyone, that

he certainly doesn't have anything new to confess, and that he is

definitely not trying to write an adventure story- the kind of war

story that's full of heroes and waving flags.

If all of that is what we should not expect, then what should we

expect? Well, if he means what he says, he's going to let the story

itself show us just exactly what was so destructive about World War I.

Maybe it's the deaths of friends; maybe it's the loss of ideals. We'll

need to read the book to find out. But we can expect every chapter

to tell us something to support his theme: that the First World War

destroyed even those who came through it alive.

CHAPTER_1

CHAPTER 1

-

The very first paragraph takes us within five miles of the front

lines. The men are resting on the ground, having just stuffed

themselves with beef and beans (the cook is stiff dishing out more).

There are double rations of bread and sausage besides, and tobacco