HS 10306 Yoon Ji Min Paper #1 st March 31 2011

If the number of casualties, the scale of despair and destruction, and the power of removing the hope can be the gauge for measuring a wars greatness, the Great War deserves its name; or else, it should flush with shame. Enrich Maria Remarques All Quiet on the Western Front, a lyrical novel of innocent youth, Paul Baumer, destructed by World War I, focuses on the struggle of an individual during the war for the first time in the literary history and creates a hero of short but sacrificing life, effectively conveying the condemnation toward the World War I. Through this epic drama of warfare Paul finds out the value of courage, the real victim of war, and its needlessness. As a hero, Paul stands up with all his courage in the time of affliction to fight for his beloved family and companions. Paul Baumer, a nave youth, volunteers to participate in a war taken by his professors word but faces the network of arching shells and lives in a suspense of uncertainty. (101) To a studious youth of the early 20th century, the war was a place of obscurity. As he takes a step forward, a rain of bullets bombard him and fear winds itself round him. If a shot comes, he can duck, that is all; he neither knows nor can determine where it will fall." (101) The war is not a simple video game in which every people owns 3 lives and can reset the game whenever they want to. Its never possible to practice a war and familiarize the pattern of the falling bullets. Paul fights hardly, but soon finds out that his friends and comrades are dying one by one, his professors patriotic speech proven to be a falsehood, and that he is no longer an extraordinary person who is guaranteed to survive in this war. The war is hopeless, but Paul accepts this fact quickly and makes his utmost efforts to struggle, not forsaking his courage. He ducks, but shoots again valiantly. His desperate behavior directly criticizes the characteristic of war, who is completely ignorant toward the individuals suffers and their courage to fight. The war also makes our hero to vacillate, questioning the actual victim of the worthless massacre. He blames the dignitaries greed, and starts to realize that his enemies he was fighting with were actually the victims of the war as he himself is. He suffers from qualms when he stabs a French soldier who has accidently fallen into the same shell-hole with him. To the lifeless corpse lying in front of them, he speaks "But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me Now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Forgive

me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?" (223) Paul faces the war in a more complex manner and feels great guilt toward the act of killing another man with his own hands. He also empathizes with the Russian prisoners when he sees them treated inhumanely. Unlike many other generals and lieutenants, he discovers that the different nationality does not justify the savage murder and that the real knave he has to fight with is the war itself. Paul gradually gets weakened mentally, and finally faces a tragic death; through the heros death, the futility of war is disclosed overtly and directly. Paul is physically wounded during the war, but more severely in his mind. This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.,(0) quotes the first sentence of the book. Nobody can blame the war because everybody is responsible for it. It is inescapable, but devastating. It nibbles Paul from his flesh, slowly to his soul. Everything demises so easily and helplessly, -his friends, his dream, his future- not even giving him the chance to grab for it. Wartime is one of the best circumstances for a hero to appear. Lives are threatened everywhere and people feel the desperate need to flee from the dark abyss. The man who overcomes these entire burdens becomes the hero; yet, mostly, a tragic hero. Enrich Remarque differentiated his novel from abundant other war novels by using the protagonist as a tool to denounce the demolition and meaninglessness of war. The only virtue of bringing about the war is that one can tell the next generation never to repeat it.