Remarque, telling his story for the most part in first-person until he briefly adopts third-person following Paul's death, enables the reader to identify with a single eyewitness account, which evolves from his own experiences on the western front. Immature and at times bewildered, Paul, still in his teens, enters the war with enthusiasm, unprepared for the total obliteration of his comrades, his country's militaristic aims, his ideals, and his own fragile hold on life. As did the painters of the late nineteenth century, Remarque uses fragmented, dramatic moments in Paul's enlightenment and molds them into a stark, impressionistic whole. The most theatrical of these moments are:
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Kemmerich's dying words
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the bombardment of the cemetery
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Paul's first furlough
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the pathos of hungry prisoners
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Gérard Duval's death
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Paul's attempt to save Kat
These scenes give readers a sense of immediacy, as though they too honed bayonets, huddled in trenches, ducked waggle-tops and daisy-cutters, and grasped at life amid chaos. Taken as a unit, or what psychologists call a gestalt, the novel converges into a bleak pattern delineating the loss of personhood under the continual pounding of artillery, planes, and Allied assault.
Like Homer, Virgil, and the epic writers who produced the Chanson de Roland, Mahabharata, Beowulf, Kalevala, El Cid, and the Nibelungenlied, Remarque emulates the conventions of war literature, particularly the Greek epic.
He centers on the battlefield, beginning in medias res, or in the middle of things, moving back to the classroom and forward to the bitter end of Paul and his friends.
He emphasizes the Homeric, or epic simile, comparing events of war with scenes from nature, as with Paul's absorption in the coming of autumn, the rustling of poplar leaves, and "the canteens [which] hum like beehives with rumours of peace."
