STYLE AND STRUCTURE

All Quiet on the Western Front is, on the whole, a very serious and even a grim novel. Remarque presents his message through vivid description and imagery. The tone is not overwhelmingly bitter.

Two things stand out in Remarque's style: his vivid word pictures and the way he balances contrasting scenes against each other to make each one stand out.

His descriptions bring every chapter to life, whether he is showing us the glare of flares or the darkness beyond the trenches, vicious rats or itchy lice, the steady drumlike beat of bombardment or the piercing shrieks of shells and wounded. His descriptions also include images of beauty and peace- usually in Paul's thoughts-that make clear how awful the front actually is. He converts a pair of boots, a goose, and the circle of light cast by campfires into symbols of friendship. And he uses similes to show the brutality of war: the men fight like thugs, like wild beasts. The tanks push relentlessly forward like steel beasts squashing bugs.

CH   FAR FROM THE FRONT  NEAR THE FRONT     AT THE FRONT           
                                 
1 Recollections:        Second Company,  
  school, Kantorek.     down to 80 men, 
                        well fed.   

2   Recollections:     Kemmerich's death  
    Himmelstoss,       in a field hospital.
    basic training     The boots.   

3   Reminiscences:     Kat's skill at   
    Himmelstoss.       foraging. Theories   
                       of war.    

4                                         Barbed wire 
                                          duty. The 
                                          wounded horses 
                                          The upturned 
                                          graves.  

5                      Insubordination     
                       to Himmelstoss. Lack   
                       of post-war goals.   
                       The goose incident.  

6                                      Days upon days 
                                       of trench  
                                       warfare.   
                                       Company down to
                                       32 men. Westhus 
                                       wounded.    

7  Paul home on        The evening with    
   leave.              the French girls.  
   Mittelstaedt's   
   humiliation by  
   Kantorek.  

8  Paul guarding the  
   Russian prisoners
   of war.      

9                  The Kaiser's visit.  Paul's killing 
                                        of Duval in the 
                                        trench. 

10 The hospital.      The supply dump.  
   Kropp left behind.            

11                                     Starvation, lack  
                                       of supplies,   
                                       demoralization.  
                                       Loss of  
                                       Detering,   
                                       Muller, Leer,  
                                       Kat.     

12                                   Paul's death on 
                                     a quiet day. 

Remarque's use of contrast, gives a new meaning to the phrase "theater of war." He keeps us moving between the trenches and the rest of the world. Even if Paul's hometown is suffering from war shortages, life there is safe and comfortable compared with the front. Even the hospital, filled with wounded, offers clean sheets and regular food-luxuries unimaginable at the front lines. These contrasts help us to understand what is happening to the emotional life of the young soldier.

The above chart will help you see more clearly how Remarque uses contrasts. The first part of All Quiet dwells on what happened at home, far from the front, and what it is like near the front. The middle chapters actually take us to the front and then pull us back several times-to civilian life, to a camp behind the lines, to a supply dump, to a hospital-so that we too feel the shock when we return, in the final chapters, to the unrelieved pressures of the front.

Finally, Remarque's style includes irony. We fully appreciate how little value is attached to a single human life by 1918 when we read the army report on the progress of the war on the day Paul dies: "All quiet on the Western Front."

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