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:
* Kemmerich’s dying words
* the bombardment of the cemetery
* Paul’s first furlough
* the pathos of hungry prisoners
* Gérard Duval’s death
* 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.”
He catalogs his warriors, introducing Paul’s classmates one by one, delineating their personality traits and idiosyncrasies, such as Detering’s interest in farming, Haie’s ham-sized hands, and Albert’s desire to reason through the illogic of war.
He stresses hubris, the Greek concept of excessive pride, as seen in Himmelstoss’ enjoyment of his power over young recruits and Kantorek’s strutting chauvinism.
He depicts Paul as the vulnerable infantryman, whose importance to the world cataclysm lifts him to the level of an everyman.
He extends his canvas over a vast setting—the Western Front, which is described as a five-hundred-mile human wall pitted against the Allied assault.
He celebrates male bonding, just as the Iliad emphasizes Achilles’ love for Patroclus, whose death overpowers his control of emotions.
He focuses on blind chance, over which humans have no power.
He maintains an objectivity toward the slaughter of a war, the proportions of which involve a long list of nations that mirror the suffering experienced by all soldiers—German or otherwise, even enemies.
In terms of the central intelligence, the novel veers sharply away from epic tradition of the noble warrior; instead, it depicts the decimation of the ordinary foot soldier. Remarque’s uncanny grasp of mental breakdown suggests a personal involvement with the character—an identification stemming from his own need to exorcise the terrors of war, which, ten years after his military service, continued to plague him. In telling the story of Paul Bäumer, a German soldier, Remarque creates a universal portrayal of warfare in all its grimness and hypocrisy, despair and waste. As Paul explains his role in the Great War:
We loved our country as much as they; we went courageously into every action; but also we distinguished the false from true, we had suddenly learned to see. And we saw that there was nothing of their world left. We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through.
