The Dogs of War and All Quiet on the Western Front essays

The Dogs of War and All Quiet on the Western Front essays "In one part of our being, a thousand years. By the animal instinct that is awakened in is we are led and protected. It is not conscious; it is far quicker, much more sure, less fallible, than consciousness. One cannot explain it"(56). On the battlefield of any war, past or present one would think any soldier had felt that sense of survival at one point or another. This could be named impulse acted on by fear, nervousness, or as the quote defined it, instinct in violence. The very descriptive violence in the book is one of the large clues that tell us Erich Maria Remarque, the author, is telling us some of the events he had to go through when he served in the war. Other wise it would have been another boring war novel of which classes could be spared the time. These points in the novel All Quiet on the Western Front, can be greatly explained and identified. When confronted with his survival, this instinct can drive a man to do anything for survival, even turn his senses and behavior into a wilder state of human evolution. One of the strongest themes in the book is that war makes man inhuman when confronted by violence and, or in war. From the author's point of view, soldiers were often compared to various non-living objects, that were inhuman. "The soldiers are often compared to coins of different provinces that are melted down, and now they bear the same stamp."(236) Remarque thinks that the soldier's mind-state has been changed from when they were schoolboys, the stamp being the mark of the soldier, changing them forever. Also, soldiers are compared with "automatons" or more commonly referred to as robots. In a reminder of all soldiers of either side had to go through and witness without the traumatizing violence and gore one would not have much understood this point. To a country or at least in charge, the soldiers are no more than this: inanimate devices of war or pawns. Remarque uses this analogy to give the impression that ...