Losing Your Feet and Finding Your Wings
             What is real and what is ideal? What is true and what is just? Who are friends and who are foes? In Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, all these questions are asked, even if not all are answered. Many themes are discussed, many emotions are touched upon; and all lead back to life and death, and who has the right to make that decision for another human being. In All Quiet on the Western Front, Paul Baümer is a disillusioned young man discovering the differences between realism and idealism, truth and justice, and the part that human bonds play, in the midst of World War I. Remarque often uses symbolism, tone, and imagery to illustrate the physical and psychological turmoil experienced during this time. Through it all, the immoral and cannibalistic nature of war, as well as the very real impacts of psychological damage vs. the superficiality of the soldiers' physical beings, is portrayed in full color, 3-d, and surround sound.
             In All Quiet on the Western Front, Remarque emphasizes the surrounding "circle of death" by juxtaposing happier times with times filled with the horrors of death and the battlefront; as "...almost a fortnight passes thus in eating, drinking, and roaming about. No one disturbs us. The village gradually vanishes under the shells and we lead a charmed life, so long as any part of the supply dump still stands we don't worry, we desire nothing better than to stay here till the end of the war." (237-238) is immediately preceded by "But every gasp lays my heart bare. This dying man has time with him, he has an invisible dagger with which he stabs me: Time and my thoughts." (221) and followed by "But we are emaciated and starved. Our food is bad and mixed up with so much substitution stuff that it makes us ill...the people at home ought to be shown these grey, yellow, miserable, wasted faces here, ...