Analysis : ' The Agony That His Friend '

Yet another example of the brutalization and dehumanization of the soldiers caused by the war occurs during Paul’s leave. On leave, Paul decides to visit his hometown. While there, he finds it difficult to discuss the war and his experiences with anyone. Furthermore, Paul struggles to fit in at home: “I breathe deeply and say over to myself:– ‘You are at home, you are at home.’ But a sense of strangeness will not leave me; I cannot feel at home amongst these things. There is my mother, there is my sister, there my case of butterflies, and there the mahogany piano – but I am not myself there. There is a distance, a

Along with personal feelings, the same goes for everyone Paul witnessing his best friend’s death have impacted their group so that they cannot feel or care for each other. After a battle that left many injured. While Paul rests he thinks of how everyone is left on their own, claiming, "We have lost all feeling for one another. We can hardly control ourselves when our hunted glance lights on the form of some other man. We are insensible, dead men, who through some trick, some dreadful magic, are still able to run and to kill" (Remarque, 116). During another day in the trenches Paul sees many bodies everywhere, soldiers being killed in front of him. Losing everyone that was close to him has caused him to lose himself mentally making him unstable. He carries the pressure of telling the families which furthermore carriers his depression. He carries a comrade’s boots as they are passed down from soldiers after each owner dies, Paul carries these boots to represent unimportance of human life. In addition to young soldiers have to follow and look up to older generation and higher rank officers which lead to betrayal. Propaganda played a huge role in World War 1 giving everyone biased opinions and bad judgements of others. These opinions gave Paul a false perspective of older generations.

In the last chapter Paul has had many terrible and horrific wartime experience and he is the last living recruit from his original group. During this time the German people are getting anxious about the ending the war. While out on the field Paul inhales poisonous gas and is given 14 days to go home. However, Paul has a weird feeling about returning home because, he has no future goals for his life. The only thing Paul can think about is the empty shell of people the war has produced. Later in this chapter Paul finally dies on a quiet day. Leaving the last words on the war “All Quiet on the Western Front”. Leaving Paul glad that the thing that destroyed him most ended. The thing that ripped something pure out of him and replaced it with emptiness.

During the war, Paul sees that his friends die or get injured. Kemmerich is the first of Paul’s friend to lose their leg in the battle. Paul notices that Kemmerich did not feel that his leg was amputated. Paul remembers Kemmerich as a childhood friend before they had signed up for the army. Paul finds Kemmerich dead after he tries to find a doctor to cure Kemmerich. After Kemmerich’s death, many of Paul’s friends died near the end of the war. Kropp’s leg is also amputated like Kemmerich when he was shot after running away from a battle with Paul. Kropp soon dies afterward after getting a fever from the wound. Paul finds out that another friend, Müller, dies after being shot in the stomach. Müller gives everything away before he dies, including the boots that Kemmerich gave Paul to give to Müller. Paul says that he would give the boot to Tjaden when his time is up. The next person to die is Company Commander Bertinck; he died after being shot in the chest. After Bertinck death, another friend of Paul named Leer is shot in the arm and later dies of eternal bleeding. Many of Paul’s friends also died from the lack of foods and supplies. One of his oldest and closest friends, Katczinsky, is also wounded during the battle. When Katczinsky was wounded, Paul tries to carry Katczinsky all the way back to safety. When he makes it back to

While on leave, Paul also visits his father and some of his father's friends, but does not wish to speak to them about the war. The men are "curious [about the war] in a way that [Paul finds] stupid and distressing." They try to imagine what war is like but they have never experienced it for themselves, so they cannot see the reality of it. When Paul tries to state his opinion, the men argue that "[he] sees only [his] general sector so [he is] not able to judge." These men believe they know more about the war and this makes Paul feel lost. He realizes that "they are different men here, men [he] can not understand..." and Paul wants to be back with those he can relate to, his fellow soldiers. Paul wishes he had never gone on leave because out there "[he] was a soldier, but [at home] he is nothing but an agony to himself." When Paul returns to the battlefield, he is excited to be with his comrades. When he sees his company, "[Paul] jumps up, pushes in amongst them, [his] eyes searching," until he finds his friends. It is then

Kemmerich – Kemmerich was one of Paul’s classmates who enlisted in the war with Paul. During the war Kemmerich was injured and had to have

Later that night, they trade food with the women for sex. On their way to the girls’ house, the soldiers “are glowing and full of a lust for adventure” (Remarque 146). Paul does not speak the same language as these girls or even know their names, yet he uses them as a channel for his sexual frustrations. Shortly after this event, Paul receives a leave of absence. Nevertheless, he cannot get away from the war fully. When he is home he tries to remember moments of his youth: “Images float through my mind, but they do not grip me, they are mere shadows and memories” (Remarque 172). No matter how hard he tries, he cannot reconnect to his childhood memories. Because of this encounter with the women, Paul is a dynamic character who regresses due to the fact the war and this specific memory wipes away his childhood and fundamentally, his

Psychologically Paul is greatly affected by his experiences in the war and is unable to express his time there. He has escaped any major injury during the most violent parts of the war. However after all his companions are killed in duty, he is restless and loses the desire to live. Paul was set free from the emotional turmoil when he dies; the physical pain no longer affects him. Ironically, he dies on an all quiet western front after seeing the terror behind the country’s nationalism.

While the disconnection allows the soldier to adapt to the brutal war environment, it inhibits them from re-entering society. When he takes his leave, he is unable to feel comfortable at home. Even if Paul had survived the war physically, he most likely would not have integrated back into society suitably. The emotional disconnection inhibits soldiers from mourning their fallen friends and comrades. However, Paul was somewhat less than able to completely detach himself from his feelings, and there are several moments in the when he feels himself pulled down by emotion. These rush of feelings indicate the magnitude to which war has automated Paul to cut himself off from feeling, as when he says, with unbridled understatement, “Parting from my friend Albert Kropp was very hard. But a man gets used to that sort of thing in the army (p. 269) .”

The young men at the front had a distant relationship that seemed to grow as the war went on. The men that fought at the front became alienated through all of the gruesome scenes they encountered and the problems they faced daily. After just two weeks of battle only half of the men that went to battle with Paul remained at the battle front. Paul along with all of the other soldiers at the front had to see their “brothers” shot and killed or wounded while fighting right by their side. Paul

Paul first sees the war as an exciting new opportunity that he will be apart of with his comrades. Unfortunately, the explicit events in the war and traumatizing scenes drive Paul to the conclusion that being a soldier is not that “heroic” after all. His view on man changes drastically as he advances into the front and becomes accustom to the killing and hardship of being in combat. “We want to live at any price; so we cannot burden ourselves with feelings which, though they might be ornamental enough in peacetime, would be out of place here” (139). Paul becomes used to the rapid ways of life in the army and the grim but undramatic attitude the men apply to the daily horrors.

"A wounded soldier? I shout to him-no answer- must be dead." The dead body has fallen out the coffin and the coffin has been unearthed because of the shelling. Even the dead and buried cannot rest in peace during this war. This just adds to the horror of the situation Paul is in.

Many of Paul's fellow army men do not survive. After the loss of Paul's closest friends,

This quote was stated at the very beginning of the book when one of Paul’s old friends, Kemmerich, is on his deathbed from an amputated leg. Paul said this because even though Kemmerich hadn’t died yet, Paul and his friends already debate about who should take Kemmerich’s boots when he does die. In doing so, they also disregard that Kemmerich doesn’t want to give the boots up yet. This grim and unorthodox reaction to a person being close to death at the start of the book really helps the author set the mood for the book as a whole. In the quote, Paul says he and his friends “have lost all sense of other considerations, because they are artificial” is his explanation for why Paul and his war comrades don’t care about the sentimentality of the

In All Quiet on the Western Front Paul witness all the horrors of war. He sees death crawling towards the wounded soldiers in the wood, hospital, and on the front. When a soldier was wounded it killed them, they lost a limb or they got sent back to the front. Another awful part of war is soldiers would get shot and stranded out in the woods. They would yell for help, but were never found. Mental wounds were another injury of war. Paul would see people go insane on the front and some soldiers got shellshock. The worst part of the war for Paul was watching all of his comrades die, and his connection with the ones he loved at home fade away. The horrors of war is clearly represented in both Battle Scars and All Quiet on the Western Front with physical wounds, mental wounds, and loss of loved ones.