Critique Paper - All Quiet on the Western Front - Essay Example

Pauls’ suppression of emotions has made him into an emotional cripple who is unable to relate to his family and live a normal life outside the battlefield (Remarque). Being stuck in a shell hole with a man he stabbed forces Paul to consider the nature of war and how it makes strangers into enemies. The horrors of war take away his friends one by one and often in front of his own eyes. He is ruined by war and when he is given a short leave, he wonders how he will adjust to civilian life, Paul dies during an enemy attack and he doesn’t have to find out how his life would have been off the battlefield (Remarque).

Paul is the novel’s main protagonist and his inner battle with his feelings and actions is what is intriguing about him. His personality and the way war forces Paul to behave are in stark contrast to each other. He was a sensitive young lad, full of idealism and life but war made him into a remorseless soldier who must remain emotionally numb in order to survive on the battlefield. Paul’s past and future are snatched away by war and he struggles to remember what his past was like and wonders what his future will be without war.

But despite all this, he still has some humanity left in him and there are instances where he is overcome by grief. This struggle is representative of all those men who were enlisted to fight in the army at a very young age and Pauls’ story is similar to all those adolescents who lost their childhood, their friends, their family and even their lives on the battlefield. The trauma and hardship they suffer snatches away their innocence and Paul was long dead on the inside before the war actually killed him.

Paul’s story revolves around the main theme of the novel which is about the horrors of war and its effect on the soldiers. War is often painted with glory and honor but this book sets out to debunk those notions and show war through the eyes of a soldier. It shows the butchery of