I read 'All Quiet on the Western Front' the last couple weeks and thought it was good, but perhaps not as spectacular as everyone seems to make it out to be. I don't think it's better than 'Journey's End' which I read as a schoolboy.
There is quite a good metaphor in All Quiet where soldiers are analogised to a collection of coins from different places that have all been melted down in one crucible and restruck into a series of identical pennies. The central notion is of war as something that obliterates all aspects of individual personhood beyond the utterly superficial; as a consequence, even the individual characters in the story are devoid of much distinction or depth. They can mostly be entirely described in little summaries such as might be scrawled on the back of a cigarette packet: 'the soldier who is greedy, the soldier who is strong, the soldier who womanises'.
But why, then, is it not the case that in other First World War narratives, or indeed in war narratives in general, that we see this same obliteration of character? Raleigh, Stanhope, and Osborne are characters who I encountered ten years ago in a schoolroom, but they still left a deep enough impression on me that I could tell you five times more about then now than I could about the men from Remarque's story. Yet they were stuck in the same muddy hell at precisely the same time in history.
In fact, even in Remarque's book, even as the narrator insists to us that all these men have become alike, we still see that this is in point of fact not true, since aspects of the one good character in the book, the saavy reservist 'Kat', still shine through right up until the point when he gets a chunk of shrapnel through his head. At which point one has to ask: is it that war obliterates the individual (in which case: how to explain Junger? how to explain Wilfred Owen?), or is it rather that the immature, traumatised, and frankly, slightly narcissistic Paul is just too myopic to realise that not everyone in a massive global conflict is identical to him and his pals.
I am next going to try and read 'The Guns of August' by Barbara Tuchman. I don't read much non-fiction but I have heard that this has particular literary merit and I do find the title phenomenally seductive.
Recommend more First World War stuff. Not Dan Carlin even though I like him, but everyone has heard that by now.
There is quite a good metaphor in All Quiet where soldiers are analogised to a collection of coins from different places that have all been melted down in one crucible and restruck into a series of identical pennies. The central notion is of war as something that obliterates all aspects of individual personhood beyond the utterly superficial; as a consequence, even the individual characters in the story are devoid of much distinction or depth. They can mostly be entirely described in little summaries such as might be scrawled on the back of a cigarette packet: 'the soldier who is greedy, the soldier who is strong, the soldier who womanises'.
But why, then, is it not the case that in other First World War narratives, or indeed in war narratives in general, that we see this same obliteration of character? Raleigh, Stanhope, and Osborne are characters who I encountered ten years ago in a schoolroom, but they still left a deep enough impression on me that I could tell you five times more about then now than I could about the men from Remarque's story. Yet they were stuck in the same muddy hell at precisely the same time in history.
In fact, even in Remarque's book, even as the narrator insists to us that all these men have become alike, we still see that this is in point of fact not true, since aspects of the one good character in the book, the saavy reservist 'Kat', still shine through right up until the point when he gets a chunk of shrapnel through his head. At which point one has to ask: is it that war obliterates the individual (in which case: how to explain Junger? how to explain Wilfred Owen?), or is it rather that the immature, traumatised, and frankly, slightly narcissistic Paul is just too myopic to realise that not everyone in a massive global conflict is identical to him and his pals.
I am next going to try and read 'The Guns of August' by Barbara Tuchman. I don't read much non-fiction but I have heard that this has particular literary merit and I do find the title phenomenally seductive.
Recommend more First World War stuff. Not Dan Carlin even though I like him, but everyone has heard that by now.