spells: your turn » Comment Here (close reading)

Before this passage, Paul and Kat was in the shootout, and the loud noise of the bombardment was all around them.

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I don’t know how to explain why I like it, but I like it how the author plays around with the words to make us go into this situation and really sense it.

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That is why the author writes about the young men thinking about war as an “ideal and almost romantic character.” They’ve never been in war before, and have no idea what they are heading towards. We can know that the assumptions that twenty men made were wrong because the author writes: “Once it was different.” This implies that to the soldiers, war was simply about being a hero, shooting guns (which seems to be very addicting for many people even today), gaining fame through bravery in battle; they simply ignored, or didn’t know about the impacts it would cause to their entire lives.

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“We feel ourselves for the time being better off than in any palatial white-tiled “convenience”. There it can only be hygienic; here it is beautiful.” (page9 line 3~5)

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Paul is turning the ‘leaves’

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he feels ‘dejected’

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(Especially starting from “I stand there dumb…” (173))

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“One could sit like this forever” this is very true b

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Even though the corpses are already dead, Paul describe that they are killed once again

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In the later pages, they even mention that they are able to throw grenades at their fathers if they were coming with the French.

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The narrator describes the body as “still, without a sound, the gurgling has ceased, but the eyes cry out, yell, all the life gathers together in them for one tremendous effort to flee, gathers together there in a dreadful terror of death, of me” (219). The second paragraph gives full detail of what is happening but also how the man is feeling. Describing his eyes crying out and yelling, gathering one tremendous effort to flee, and feeling the dreadful terror of death, were three great expressions how the man felt.

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Short, but intense. I believe this quote holds the major idea of this book. According to Paul and his allies, they had to face a destiny of impossibles, which “at school nobody ever taught [Paul or others]…” (85). It was unavoidable. During such battles, there would come a day where Paul and others will try to “light cigarette[s] in a storm of rain” (85). During such situations where you were ordered to camp outside, there would come a day where Paul and others had to make “fire…with wet wood” (85). During such cruel wars, there would come a day where Paul and others would “stick bayonet[s] in [the enenmies’] bell[ies]…”

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Similar pictures can be formed when reading such as:
“I open my eyes–my fingers grasp a sleeve, an arm. A wounded man? I yell to him–no answer–a dead man. My hand gropes farther, splinters of wood–now I remember again that we are lying in the graveyard.” (pg.67 1st full paragraph)

This was another passage that I had a very strong impression of. The characters were in the graveyard, and suddenly “shelling” occurs and bombs are exploding everywhere, gas is spread, the graveyard is a huge mess. The narrator, Paul, deals with helping his fellows out while trying to save his own life. Further along in the next paragraphs, the struggle through the gas is explained so detailed, yet so amazingly real. When he “open[ed] [his] eyes–[his] fingers grasp a sleeve, an arm” I was shocked. Instead of just explaining by saying ‘I opened my eyes and caught a dead man’s arm’, the author chose to write it like a list of things happening–describing each detail, one by one.

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Remarque, in his novel All Quiet on the Western Front, portrays the lost youth in war. He uses the metaphor “waste land” to imply that the soldiers’ minds have been shelled and torn, to become nothing but “waste”(20, Remarque). Remarque indicates that the cruelty of war have made the soldiers lose their ability to feel anything: “they have been gripped by it” that they feel numb about death and their future (20, Remarque). The young soldiers are confused, because their futures have been swallowed whole by war: once they have entered the war, they “do not know what the end may be” (20, Remarque).

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Remarque, in his novel All Quiet on the Western Front, portrays the lost youth in war. He uses the metaphor “waste land” to imply that the soldiers’ minds have been shelled and torn, to become nothing but “waste”(20). Remarque indicates that the cruelty of war have made the soldiers lose their ability to feel anything: “they have been gripped by it” that they feel numb about death and their future (20). The young soldiers are confused, because their futures have been swallowed whole by war: once they have entered the war, they “do not know what the end may be” (20).

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Remarque also artfully contrasts the old soldiers–who can think beyond [the war]”– to the young soldiers who know nothing of what their future may be. Remarque emphasizes this irony of war, the war that was supposed to give “glory” to the soldiers, is actually killing their souls.

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Remarque also artfully contrasts the old soldiers–who can think beyond [the war]”– to the young soldiers who know nothing of what their future may be (20). Remarque emphasizes this irony of war, the war that was supposed to give “glory” to the soldiers, is actually killing their souls.

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What a vivid description—no fancy long words, yet precise language is used and straightforwardly handles the battle scene. Consecutive hit followed by series of horrible spectacles provides no time to relax, yet continues to pour bitter reality of war. The phrase, “soldiers run with their two feet cut off,” shows how soldiers desperately want to continue their lives. Adjectives and adverbs to decorate nouns and verbs are barely used. Concise but powerful, words of this paragraph never tell yet they show. Pain—although this word did not appear directly in the text, I still can see it. The last sentence of paragraph contains such an intense implication. Night and death, the two words that can never be detached again assure their strong bond in the sentence. How the author used “whine” to describe firing of shells is impressive as well.

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Killing was easy for him before because he had only thought of the enemy as an “idea” – not a person; as a result, “it was an abstraction I stabbed,” meaning that he could easily kill something that is not alive (223). However, killing is no longer easy for the protagonist who says, “Now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me” (223). The pronoun “you” is the man that he stabbed brutally (223). He realizes that both his comrade and his enemy are human beings. His fears “of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle” turned the protagonist into a brutal killer, but now his visions of “your wife and your face” turn him back to a man with a conscience (223). Next, the protagonist asks the dead man for forgiveness because he is truly sorry for ending a precious life, and he wonders “Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us?” (223). “They” refers to both of their commanders (223). The protagonist understands their similarities when he uses the pronouns “our” and “us” (223). Both the killer and the killed have the same “anxious” mothers who love them, the same “fear of death” that always stay in their minds, the same “dying” which is their unlucky fate, and the same “agony” of being in the trench (223). When the protagonist realizes these truths about being a soldier, he feels so guilty about killing his enemy. This quotation clearly signifies a great change in the protagonist’s attitude toward the war. This quote shows the war’s brutal reality.

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