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.