Question 4: Describe at least one physical setting in the text
Explain how the message was conveyed
Erich Maria Remarque is a German-born novelist his landmark novel is called all quiet on the western front based on his experience in the German imperial army during World War 1
Remarque became a world renowned author, even after a century has passed since World War 1 he is still one of the most influential, most vivid, most admired, and most widely read literary about war of the last hundred years his writing showed everyone the truth of war it was not an honorable thing to celebrate it is disgusting and gruesome what the soldiers on the front lines had to witness.
The front lines/trenches are a horrendous place Paul (the narrator) said it’s like a cage, this shows how there is no escape and captures the image of the soldiers trapped at the front lines more clearly.
In all quiet on the western front, Remarque shows the setting of the front lines and the importance it shows as Paul and his comrades struggle to survive battling the harsh environments they’ve been thrown into during World War 1 as they walk through the field of battle to step over and step on dead bodies of their comrades and their enemies this just proves the gruesomeness of the novel and what Erich Maria Remarque was trying to prove during WW1 In the German front lines building on these factors you can already tell that Remarque is using the imagery of the horrors of war.
They survive one day at a time, lying in wait for the enemy to attack or an order for them to advance behind enemy lines they sit and lie in the mud along the narrow trenches extending for miles full of craters from explosion from the explosive shells:
“The moment that the first shells whistle over and the air is rent with the explosions, there is suddenly in our veins.
Remarque describes the horror of war and the front lines and what they have done to the soldiers, how it has changed them making them inhuman more animalistic showing their killer instinct when they step onto the frontline. It is nothing to joke about, after all Paul and his friends have been through the dead bodies have been normalized to these boys heads they don’t freak out or anything it’s a dead body.
In the trenches they are nothing but tools at the higher ups disposal, so they do as they are told like puppets they risk their lives for something like glory when war is not glorious it is vile. The soldiers are just young men that have been thrown into a war, but war is not what they thought, War destroyed their generation.
