All Quiet on the Western Front

Same war, same stripped prose style, same lost generation — but Hemingway gives his narrator a love story as ballast; Remarque refuses the consolation

The same generation's survivors, seen from the civilian side — what happens when the men from Paul's world come home and try to live in it

The same critique of military bureaucracy, taken to satirical extremes — where Remarque is tragic, Heller is absurdist; both reach the same conclusion

The closest contemporary parallel — same insistence on the specific physical reality of war, same meditation on what soldiers carry that has nothing to do with equipment

Takes Remarque's dehumanization to its logical endpoint — a soldier reduced to a living torso with no limbs, no face, no means of communication; the horror Remarque implies, made literal

Same group-portrait structure, same documentary realism, same concern with how institutions dehumanize — transposed to WWII and the Pacific