Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
I'm going to be contrarian and say that AQotWF didn't hold up to my memory of it. I've read a lot of Great War literature and there are many first-person and quasi-first person accounts with greater insight and of higher literary quality. This worked as the thoughts of a not-very-well-educated nineteen-year old, but the verisimilitude made it far less compelling to me than the accounts of the officer class. And the end was just cheesy. Remarque had it both ways; a first-person account would end either abruptly with the obvious inference or with the narrator having survived, but Remarque had to go for the final tug at the heartstrings with the third person ending. It would have been better just to stop.
|
Great comments from our resident expert on books about WWI.
That said I will make some contrarian comments to the contrarian.
I actually like that the story was told from the point of view of young enlisted private instead of from that of an officer. In large part because in Europe at that time the division between officers and privates would have reflected the economic and social class stratification in the peace time countries.
I agree with you about then ending. Perhaps Remarque was a little at a loss about how to best wrap the story up? I've heard literary critics say similar things about Mark Twain and the ending of
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In my opinion it might have been better to just end AQotWF with the end of chapter XI:
Quote:
On the way without my having noticed it, Kat has caught a splinter in the head. There is just one little hole, it must have been a very tiny, stray splinter. But it has sufficed. Kat is dead.
Slowly I get up.
“Would you like to take his paybook and his things?” the lance-corporal asks me.
I nod and he gives them to me.
The orderly is mystified. “You are not related, are you?”
No, we are not related. No, we are not related.
Do I walk? Have I feet still? I raise my eyes, I let them move round, and turn myself with them, one circle, one circle, and I stand in the midst. All is as usual. Only the Militiaman Stanislaus Katczinsky has died.
Then I know nothing more.
|
or to make Chapter XII the final chapter, but omit the final two paragraphs of that.
Quote:
But perhaps all this that I think is mere melancholy and dismay, which will fly away as the dust, when I stand once again beneath the poplars and listen to the rustling of their leaves. It cannot be that it has gone, the yearning that made our blood unquiet, the unknown, the perplexing, the oncoming things, the thousand faces of the future, the melodies from dreams and from books, the whispers and divinations of women; it cannot be that this has vanished in bombardment, in despair, in brothels.
Here the trees show gay and golden, the berries of the rowan stand red among the leaves, country roads run white out to the sky line, and the canteens hum like beehives with rumours of peace.
I stand up.
I am very quiet. Let the months and years come, they can take nothing from me, they can take nothing more. I am so alone, and so without hope that I can confront them without fear. The life that has borne me through these years is still in my hands and my eyes. Whether I have subdued it, I know not. But so long as it is there it will seek its own way out, heedless of the will that is within me.
He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.
He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come.
|
Either would have been in my opinion a stronger ending. I would have preferred it to end on a note that it is unknown if Bäumer returned home after the war or died before it ended. It really does not matter either way to the fact that his generation was destroyed by the war whether they lived or died. And that when this war ends there will just be another soon enough; in the case of WWI in just a generation.