Book Review
Title: All Quiet on the Western Front
Author: Erich Maria Remarque
Publisher: Turtleback Books
Date: January 1, 1975 (orig. November 1928)
ISBN: 978-0881039825
[SPOILER ALERT] This review tells you how it ends.
The story begins near the beginning of World War I and ends very near the end of the war. It is told by the character “autobiographer” first-person narrator Paul Bäumer. He quickly evolves from green recruit to among the most seasoned and savvy soldiers in the German army. His friends who joined at the same time stay with him and are important characters throughout the story, even as they gradually drop out of the story by virtue of being killed or permanently injured and sent home (mostly the former).
Remarque draws vivid pictures of the soldier’s life in the trenches, but also just as vividly portrays scenes in makeshift hospitals, trudging back and forth to the trenches, and notably the emotionally conflicting experience on leave back in his hometown for a couple of weeks. He also served briefly in a training camp near a prison that held captured Russian soldiers. In other words, Remarque excels at bringing any kind of scene to life on the page.
The book is a novel, not an autobiographical work. But it is filled with actual experiences of the author who served in World War I. The tone is introspective and philosophical during the lulls in fighting, guarding, watching, waiting for the next onslaught. But the descriptions in the thick of the onslaughts—shelling, attacks, counterattacks, hand-to-hand fighting, killing, almost being killed—in these most horrific scenes the tone shifts to a mechanical, vivid-but-clinical, description, including when the narrator’s own comrades are killed in front of him. This reliance on a more clinical tone to describe the most horrible sights and sounds rings true. I found this exact same phenomenon in two other World War I books written from first-hand experience: Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel, and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Both revert to that same distancing in the detached-yet-vivid recitation of the most terrible experiences. It seems a necessary psychological-survival mechanism.
[SPOILER ALERT] On the very last page the point of view changes from first-person narrator to third-person omniscient. The “autobiographer” first-person narrator who has been telling the story from page 1 onwards, finally dies—so the point-of-view shift is necessary on the last page in order to finish the story. Seeing the end of the storyteller highlights the doomed enterprise, the mortality of everyone in such a war. Normally the reader assumes the narrator of the story must have survived it. So it is with great impact that a third-person omniscient observer steps in at the last to shock us with the death of the main character.
The sadness of the ending, and indeed of the whole story, brings home the truth of the everyday life and death of a soldier in the trenches of World War I. I highly recommend the book for it’s truth, as well as its striking æsthetic achievement as a classic work of literary art.
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