All Quiet on the Western Front
In All Quiet on the Western Front, an anti-war novel, Paul, the narrator, and his friends are twenty years old and younger, yet they have been through and experienced more than most grown men. Paul refers to himself and others his age as lost because their youth has been taken away from them. They are fighting in a war that makes no sense to them, and are witnessing massive human suffering at a time when they should be enjoying the carefree innocence of youth. Paul expresses this loss of innocence with a bitter tone: "We are none of us more than twenty years old. But young? Youth? That is long ago. We are old folk." Being soldiers in the war has opened their eyes to so many atrocities that nobody should ever have to experience. They witness overwhelming amounts of killing, pain, fear, and sadness. Paul says, "We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial-I believe that we are lost." The language that they have acquired is crude, impolite, and that of the uneducated. They say they are 'forlorn like childr
"He is right. We are not youth any longer. We don't want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war." As the war drags on, it gets harder and harder for the soldiers to remember their past lives; their family, friends, homes, and hobbies. They are forgetting how to enjoy life. The war has ruined their lives. As the boys are sitting around talking, Albert, a friend of Paul's, expresses how "the war has ruined us for everything." Paul responds by saying: Before the war, Paul and his friends went to school like all children. Now, as soldiers, they see that war could be the only life they will ever know; they do not see the point in learning about reading, writing, and arithmetic. Paul expresses this disillusionment when he says, "We rem
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Approximate Word count = 726
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)
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