How does your theme change/remain consistent throughout the book?
- The theme "Loss of Humanity" is a changing theme.
- The soldiers in the beginning of the book were just experiencing the war and the effects had already hit them.
- Towards the middle and the end of the book, the effects of the war had already started to taken a toll on the soldiers.
- When Paul returns home on leave he sits in his room rather than interacting with his loved ones.
Analysis
- In Chapter 1-2, while Kemmerich is dying, the soldiers are more concerned about who will get his boots.The value of human life has become so little because of the amount of daily deaths.
- Very little mourning
- Soldiers go days upon days living in dirty trenches and have to fight with rats for food.
- Paul cannot picture his future without the war and can't even recollect the past.
Why does Remarque use this in the novel?
Does the theme lead to internal/external conflict?
- Remarque vividly describes the thoughts and feelings of the german soldiers to express the emotional effects of the war .
- "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.” - Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
- The Loss of Humanity in "All Quiet On The Western Front" leads to internal and external conflict .
- Characters are dealing with feelings that they're not too aware of and this can lead to bigger problems.
- Soldiers become emotionless
- Soldiers have no one to talk to and even talking to their comrades isn't enough.
- The families are also being shut out from the soldiers.
Is this effective in evoking emotion in the reader?
Quotes
- "We are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost.” -Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
- "I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another.”-Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
- The loss of humanity evokes reader's emotions by describing how the soldiers feel.
- When Paul went home on leave he couldn't connect with his family and hated being there because it was too hard for him.He says...
- Pg. 154 "Suddenly I become filled with a consuming impatience to be gone."
- Pg. 179 " What is leave"- A pause that only makes everything after so much worse."
- Pg. 185 "I ought to have never come on leave"
Loss Of Humanity
By:Allison Boursiquot, Catelyn Clark, Megan Kozlowski, and Shea Tyler