All Quiet On The Western Front Narrative Essay

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David Zheng Mr. Gutmann AP literature November 27, 2012 The Impact of The First Person Narrative Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, a fictional account of the Great War, articulates the individual’s struggle against overbearing forces outside of his realm of control. The various countries involved in the complex war, especially Germany, blindly lodge into a conflict so grand that a “lost generation” conceives. The corrupt yet patriotic members of the older generation in Germany impose their fatalistic ideals on the younger generation, which inevitably crumbles under the gruesome nature of war. In the wake of the soldiers walks death, which garners fear in them to the extent of taking up violence as a means to extinguish it. Remarque employs the first person narrative and allows readers to follow the accounts of Paul Baumer, an…show more content…
Throughout the story, Paul develops from a child-minded youth to a mature yet disturbed adult. In the last few sentences an omniscient narrator replaces Baumer and announces, “He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.” By the saying of “all quiet” the narrator seems to say that Baumer’s death appears so insignificant, as with many other deaths, that a reporting did not exist. In All Quiet on the Western Front, the men sacrifice everything for nothing. They give up their lives for a set of ideals that are either incomprehensible or false. Corrupt idealistic governments, assembled individual men like pawns and threw them into trenches of hell with their enemies. All for the sake of political gain and false patriotism, the Great War robbed a generation of men of their freedom and future. Today individuals involve themselves in a perpetual conflict against powers outside of their control: technology, death, social convention,
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