This novel recalls Stephen Crane's poem "War is Kind" and
Ernest Hemingway's short story "Soldier's Home." In Crane's poem, as in Part I of
All Quiet on the Western Front, the glories of war are exalted and
the war propaganda abounds, but is satirized by both. Then, as in Hemingway's
"Soldier's Home" in which the son returns home, Paul in Part II returns for a visit to
his home and realizes that he is not the same person and he cannot relate. In Part IV,
once the war is over, Paul reflects upon what it means to go home after seeing friends
shot and killed:
Now is we go back we will be weary, broken,
burnt out, rootless, without hope. We will not be able to find our way any
more.
And men will not understand us....We will be
superfluous even to ourselves, we will grow older, a few will adapt themselves, some
others will merely submit, and most will be bewildered--the years will pass by, and we
shall fall into ruin....
I am very quiet. Let the months
and years come, they can take nothing from me, nothing more. I am so alone, so without
hope that I can confront them without
fear.
Erich Maria Remarque's
novel is the desperate recordings of a human soul that has gone much farther into the
depths of desperation that anyone should. Because of this, Remarque records the
terrors and aloneness of the World War I soldier so that people will understand the
horrors of war for a generation lost because of this experience.
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