Book Report on “All Quiet at the Western Front”

Nowadays Erich Maria Remarque’s most famous novel is “All Quiet at the Western Front”. This anti-war novel has remained popular till our days due to its unprecedented criticism of war in general and World War I in particular. Such sharp criticism is conditioned by the personal experience of the author. Being a young man of eighteen years old he was sent to the front and saw the reality of the war from within. This gave him the impressions that were incarnated in the novel. Therefore Remarque’s work strikes with its realism and bare hatred towards war. The novel was the first work of this author and the most successful. Further he also wrote on significant social and political themes but none of his works was appraised as highly as “All Quiet at the Western Front”.book report
The story is narrated by a young soldier Paul Bäumer who went to the front right after the graduation from school. Being a sensitive person, who wrote poetry, he faces all the horrors of the war and is scared and disappointed. Together with his friends he joined the army voluntarily inspired by speeches of his teacher about the patriotic duty and the honor of being a soldier. However, having found himself at the front, he saw as all his ideas went to ruin. When Paul and his comrades are given a respite after several weeks of fighting they realize that only eighty people of one hundred and fifty returned from the front. Every day Paul faces the horror of the war, he watches his friend Kemmerich dying from gangrene, he sees a field sown by corpses, by parts of thrown bodies, eaten by rats and he is afraid of becoming such a rat, an animal that doesn’t have feelings. When Paul receives seventeen days of leave and comes back home, he feels differently. He understands that he has changed and that his feelings have atrophied. “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” .
However, his natural compassion does not give him to bury his feelings and he is still able to feel grief when his friends die and when he learns that his mother is ill with cancer. But these remnants of feelings just highlight how much the war changed him. Another blow is received when Paul has to kill an enemy soldier, Gérard Duval, and to watch as he is dying next to him. This trauma is perhaps the strongest as Paul understands that he has killed the soldier instinctively, because he was an enemy, however, when he discovers some details about Duval, he realizes that was such a victim of war as he was himself. He had a wife and children who waited for him at home and he had not done anything to Paul except simple being on the other side of the front. “Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony—Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?”
Paul realizes the senselessness of the war and unreasonableness of deaths of thousands of people. Moreover, he understands the role of the war in his own life and in the life of young people of his age. Having come to the front after the school they do not know what to do after the war. They became adult and experienced during the war and their maturity started in such abnormal conditions that they do not imagine other life. Sometimes it seems to Paul that when the war is over, he will be lost in this life.
Describing the essence of the war, Remarque does not conceal the hatred towards the war. The main theme of the novel is the inadmissibility of the war, its senselessness and horror. The war takes away millions of lives but none of them is justified and all the high-sounding words about the glory of being a soldier are nothing compared to everything that war does to a person.