Summary
In the autumn of 1918,
after the bloodiest summer in Paul’s wartime experience, Paul is
the only living member of his original group of classmates. The
war continues to rage, but now that the United States has joined
the Allies, Germany’s defeat is inevitable, only a matter of time. In
light of the extreme privations suffered by both the German soldiers and
the German people, it seems likely that if the war does not end soon,
the German people will revolt against their leaders.
After inhaling poison gas, Paul is given fourteen days
of leave to recuperate. A wave of intense desire to return home
seizes him, but he is frightened because he has no goals; were he
to return home, he wouldn’t know what to do with himself.
He fears that his generation will yield no survivors—that they will
return home as living corpses, shells of human beings. He cannot
bear the thought. Something that is essentially human in them must
survive the years of bombardment, but he feels that his own life
has been irrevocably destroyed.
After years of fighting, Paul is finally killed in October
of 1918, on an extraordinarily quiet, peaceful
day. The army report that day contains only one phrase: “All quiet
on the Western Front.” As Paul dies, his face is calm, “as though
almost glad the end had come.”
Analysis
Throughout All Quiet on the Western Front, Remarque
portrays the soldiers as men constantly in flight from death. He
often portrays this flight as a losing race against annihilation.
The short, epilogue-like final chapter of the novel hammers this
point home with savage irony. Paul and his friends survive nearly
three years of trench warfare, only to die within months of the
peace agreement. Paul dies in October 1918;
the armistice that ended World War I was signed in November. Paul
is also the last of the boys in his class. His death marks the end
of a generation of young men from his town, who represent the lost
generation as a whole. Some soldiers may have survived the war,
but, in this chapter, Remarque portrays the conflict as having symbolically
eradicated an entire generation.
To this point, Paul has narrated the events of All
Quiet on the Western Front. The last two paragraphs of
the novel, however, which detail Paul’s death, are put forth by
an unnamed, unspecified narrator on a separate page of the book.
This passage marks the only time that the narration shifts out of
the first person; additionally, the tense changes from present to
past—the only time it does so beyond Paul’s flashbacks. Remarque
gives us no insight as to who this impromptu narrator is or at what
point in time this reflection upon the story occurs, which
helps to render the story timeless. The unemotional and impersonal
nature of this concluding narration echoes the impersonality of
the army report issued on the day of Paul’s death. It is also consistent
with the extraordinary omission of details about Paul’s death—the
narrator tells us simply that Paul “fell.”
Paul’s death is made even more senseless by the extraordinary peace
and calm of the day on which he dies. The final indignity of the novel
is perpetrated by the German army after Paul’s death, as the army
report that day reads: “All quiet on the Western Front”—the source
of the novel’s ironic and sardonic title. The carnage is so widespread
in the war that the death of an individual soldier means nothing;
a man can be shot down and the day still can be considered “[a]ll
quiet.” The war has systematically wiped out the humanity of the
soldiers who fight in it; with Paul’s death, the placid military report
succeeds in eradicating his entire existence, as well as his mortal
sacrifice for the empty ideals of nationalism and patriotism that
forced him into the war.
