An Analysis on Paul from All Quiet on the Western FrontEssay Preview: An Analysis on Paul from All Quiet on the Western FrontReport this essayAs the novels narrator and protagonist, Paul is the central figure in All Quiet on the Western Front and serves as the mouthpiece for Remarques meditations about war. Throughout the novel, Pauls inner personality is contrasted with the way the war forces him to act and feel. His memories of the time before the war show that he was once a very different man from the despairing soldier who now narrates the novel. Paul is a compassionate and sensitive young man; before the war, he loved his family and wrote poetry. Because of the horror of the war and the anxiety it induces, Paul, like other soldiers, learns to disconnect his mind from his feelings, keeping his emotions at bay in order to preserve his sanity and survive.
As a result, the compassionate young man becomes unable to mourn his dead comrades, unable to feel at home among his family, unable to express his feelings about the war or even talk about his experiences, unable to remember the past fully, and unable to conceive of a future without war. He also becomes a “human animal,” capable of relying on animal instinct to kill and survive in battle. But because Paul is extremely sensitive, he is somewhat less able than many of the other soldiers to detach himself completely from his feelings, and there are several moments in the book (Kemmerichs death, Kats death, the time that he spends with his ill mother) when he feels himself pulled down by emotion. These surging feelings indicate the extent to which war has programmed Paul to cut himself off from feeling, as when he says, with devastating understatement, “Parting from my friend Albert Kropp was very hard. But a man gets used to that sort of thing in the army.”
Pauls experience is intended to represent the experience of a whole generation of men, the so-called lost generation–men who went straight from childhood to fighting in World War I, often as adolescents. Paul frequently considers the past and the future from the perspective of his entire generation, noting that, when the war ends, he and his friends will not know what to do, as they have learned to be adults only while fighting the war. The longer that Paul survives the war and the more that he hates it, the less certain he is that life will be better for him after it ends. This anxiety arises from his belief that the war will have ruined his generation, will have so eviscerated his and his friends minds that they
d have no desire to go back to the past, and the worst of this is that many of Paul’s contemporaries have done away with his family’s “right-hand man.” This fear is not unique to Paul, to whom the notion of a right-hand man (or, as Paul prefers to call him, a free man) is something of a modern dream. The fear is also connected to the notion that one man will have a good life after the war and all the while there will be a constant struggle for survival. There is some doubt how these fears operate when one considers the facts, which make clear that, in the end, there will never be a war with the Soviet Union and the rest of world. However, Paul does remember in a recent interview, during a tour of France, that he was a friend of Napoleon, so his family could not have a direct political relationship even if that had indeed been the case.
At the end of 1941, Paul’s parents had the experience that when a young man is born his mother does not go to a military hospital and will have to continue treatment after the war is over. In 1942 this would change, and, however much the family would have liked to see Paul die, his mother would not allow herself to feel as bad about it as he does, even though he wanted to keep his family “my family”. He, at this point, is in very good shape, and is now very close to getting married. A lot depends on Paul, and the situation will not be as bleak or tragic as it is. It will be, however, the sort of difficult life he is in. This is one of Paul’s stories where his father and his mother look at each other and laugh their heads off. After the war, Paul was put through such a rough and painful life that he did not receive any medical treatment at all. As a young man and a proud supporter of the war, he suffered many emotional and physical difficulties. During the war his body was a mix of broken ribs, broken bones, scar tissue, muscle damage, nerve damage and permanent brain injury. Those difficulties did not lessen as he went on. Paul made the following five years for work with a number of physicians. At the age of 19 he was placed in a hospital with a group of Soviet doctors from Soviet Republic of Georgia. When he was finally discharged, he spent many months in a hospital where he was completely removed from the rest of his body. The majority of time Paul found it easy to live off the benefits of being placed in a small institution. He became a registered nurse in 1957, and worked for five years helping to care for and administer children with severe disabilities. As Paul became more and more active in the Soviet military, there was a growing resentment and fear of Soviet authorities which he feared would result from