All Quiet on the Western Front has been proclaimed as “the greatest war novel of all-time.” Just look at the front cover above.
Anyways, I had to read this book for my tenth grade World Literature class, so I figured I’d let you guys, that is, whoever cares about this blog, get my take on it and decide whether or not you wanna get it yourself.
All Quiet on the Western Front is the story of Paul Baumer, a volunteer German soldier in World War I. The story begins in the middle of Paul’s career in the army, with him saying, “We are at rest five miles from the front. Yesterday we were relieved and now our bellies are full of beef and haricot beans” (1). The following story is told fron Paul’s point of view, which is a very effective tool for the story. This is so because we see a war from the eyes of the victims (we all should know that Germany lost both World Wars) and not the winners. We also see it from the trenches, the dirty places, the battlefields, the camps. The places where today’s war correspondents would never go. All Quiet does a good job, at least in my estimation, in portraying the reality that was war back then.
The statement above is further backed up by the background of the author. Erich Remarque (1898-1970) fought in WWI himself and was wounded 5 times, the last severely. When we think of great authors today, names like Remarque don’t come up as often as names like Homer, Grisham and Hawthorne among others. In fact, Remarque was not as well known because of the lack of American publishing of his books. All Quiet is one of the few.
The most intense part of All Quiet comes during a humongous battle in chapter six. There is intense fighting and many die. The line that characterizes most of Paul’s, and possibly Remarque’s thoughs about the war comes on page 113 in that chapter: “We have become wild beasts. We do not fight, we defend ourselves against annihilation. It is not against men we fling our bombs, what do we know of men in this moment when Death is hunting us down.”
All Quiet comes across as a heavily anti-war book, whether Remarque intended to do that or not. Throughout the book, Paul, who I assumed was a character similar to Remarque, describes the terrible conditions, gore (one guy gets shot in the back and Paul can see his lungs pumping, others are completely dislimbed and dismantled), and overall scarecity of anything good in war. Even when Paul goes home on leave, he finds it hard to adjust to a life without bloodshed and gore.
I defeinitely recommend All Quiet on the Western Front. Out of the books we have read this year in English (The Odyssey, The Inferno, The Count of Monte Cristo) All Quiet stands out as one that is the most realistic and does not need Hell, gods or confused identities to make an enjoyable read. In an Aurora Forum conducted by Stanford University, war correspondent Chris Hedges, who has covered wars in the Middle East for The New York Times, said that “the only way to understand war is to see it in the eyes of the victims.” In All Quiet on the Western Front, we get that picture.
Grade: A
