All Quiet on the Western Front
Erich Maria Remarque (1929)
“The most devastating anti-war novel ever written — by a man who was there at 18, and who the Nazis tried to silence by burning every copy they could find.”
Character Analysis
Paul is nineteen when the novel begins. He is educated — he aspired to be a poet — but the war has stripped his language of ornament, and he cannot quite remember who he was before. His matter-of-fact narration is not callousness; it is the surface of a person who has learned that feeling everything would be incompatible with survival. His one moment of full feeling — the shell crater with Gérard Duval — reveals what the flatness is suppressing. He is the novel's argument made human: the generation that the war used up.
First-person, present-tense, declarative. Minimal emotion attributed to himself. Intense attention to physical detail. When philosophical, brief and direct — not elaborate.