18th Century Fine Arts, Music, Theater, and Dance

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All Quiet On The Western Front- 5 Main Points

• This is a story about war, you can't expect a happy ending. 
• The book humanizes the act of war. It's no longer a battle that is happening way over there, it is a battle the reader is now apart of, personally.
• If Paul Baumer were to have survived the war and made it back home, I personally believe he still would not have had a happy ending. 
• Paul has lost the ability to live in normal society. He cannot deal with the elders regarding him as a "hero" and he struggles with empathizing with normal civilians.
• This book could be about anyone in the war- German, Russian, French, anyone.

Paul Baumer

Paul Baumer is the narrator of the book, All Quiet On The Western Front. The book is narrated in 1st person, set up to be like a diary of Paul’s experiences during war. When we start the story, he is a 19-year-old boy just graduated from high school with a mother, father, and older sister. Due from intense pressure from society, Paul enlists in the German army along with 27 of his other classmates. Paul begins the story with several friends, still a little green around the gills and optimistic about life. Most of the book is filled with Paul’s philosophical thinking, reflecting on the war and what it has done to him and the other men in his platoon. He talks about not only the physical limits he is pushed to, but also the psychological limits he experiences. Paul struggles with trying to keep his sanity while battling in a war he is losing, as well as dealing with the brutal situations which come with trench warfare.

Paul Baumer is a kind and gentle young man, but because of the war and the pain it
induces, Paul learns how to disconnect his mind from his heart. By doing this, Paul becomes
unable to feel the heartache of his comrades’ deaths, as well as the ability to conjure the idea of
a future without war. The most disheartening thing that Paul loses because of the war was his
capacity to feel at home among his family and town that he once loved so much.

"Just as we turn into animals when we go up to the line . . . so we turn into wags and loafers
when we are resting. . . . We want to live at any price; so we cannot burden ourselves with
feelings which, though they may be ornamental enough in peacetime, would be out of place
here.”

Paul speaks of how the war turned him into an animal during battle, because he could only rely
on his most basic instincts, or else he would surely die.

Chapter 12 All Quiet On The Western Front

By Chapter Twelve of All Quiet on the Western Front, Paul Baumer is disillusioned with his role in life and the role of his life as it used to be. All his adult life he has been entrenched in a war that has basically consumed everything about the world as he knew it and destroyed his perception of what everyone else would see as a normal and functioning society. As seen in the chapter where he visits home, Paul actually misses the battlefield when he is gone. He can no longer function under the normal pressures of society as his body has gotten used to being in high pressure situations all the time. 

“Everyone talks of peace and armistice. All wait. If it again proves an illusion, then they will break up; hope is high, it cannot be taken away again without upheaval. If there is not peace, then there will be revolution.” 

            And even though he’d miss the battlefield, it has grown old. Watching people die and living in constant fear that he could be the next to go.

“It cannot be that it has gone, the yearning that made our blood unquiet, the unknown, the perplexing, the oncoming things, the thousand faces of the future, the melodies from dreams and from books, the whispers and divinations of women; it cannot be that this has vanished in bombardment, in despair, in brothels.”

            It is possible though, that he still believes in the innocence of youth. That even though his classmates and other soldiers his age and younger have had to live and die on the battlefield, they still contain traces of the young men that they were. Hope for the future and hope of a future love still being held close to their hearts. 

“There are not many of the old hands left. I am the last of the seven fellows from our class.”

            He is the last surviving character that was introduced at the beginning of the novel, which makes sense he being the narrator and all. Of course that all changes on the backside of the last page when we learn he died on the quietest day of the year in what is possibly the least descript death of a main character ever. What killed him? A sniper? Too much gas inhalation? A ninja? Maybe even a bee sting? It is unlikely however, that it was as is shown in the movie. There were no birds or drawings involved.