All Quiet On The Western Front Critical Analysis

When a man experiences combat and comes face to face with the dark side of human nature, his body and mind are stressed to their absolute limits. Survival requires the adoption of coping mechanisms and behaviors in order to deal with the tremendous amount of stress encountered by the soldier. Both Erich Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried vividly explain the horrors of war. Although the soldiers in World War I and the Vietnam War fought on very different battlefields, the strategies in which they use to cope with death and destruction are profoundly similar.
In both All Quiet on the Western Front and The Things They Carried soldiers experience guilt because they survived the war but their comrades died on the battlefield. Paul experiences guilt throughout the entire story, but what strikes him the most is when he kills a man in hand to hand combat. Immediately after …show more content…
In All Quiet on the Western Front, the soldiers are livid because almost half of their original group is dead. Their only joy is eating their meals, but the rats ate their only remaining rations. The boys enacted revenge on the rats in their bunkers by luring them in with food and then “[striking] at the heap [of rats]” until the bunker is “blood scented” and the rats stopped coming to the food (Remarque 102). In The Things They Carried, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross’s company was in a fire-fight with the enemy and some of his comrades died. Afterwards, they approach a village and decide to “burn everything. They shoot chickens and dogs” just for the satisfaction of revenge (O’Brien 16). Instead of peacefully coping, the soldiers enact a violent revenge which affects the enemy and many other innocent families. As seen in both books, the men are able to distract themselves from the guilt of war by using more death and

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All Quiet On The Western Front Critical Analysis