Instant Access To 100,000+ Essays!

Few things exist that provoke as fearful or as gruesome an image as war. War brings about hardship, pain and suffering to all involved. It is the battle of two sides made of trained fighting machines, previously known as young men, many of whom do not understand for what they are fighting. These feelings of war have carried through to future generations as well; young people of today have not experienced a war first hand, but can still relate to these feelings and emotions with the help of descriptive texts in literature. Both the novel All Quiet On the Western Front and the poem “The Man He Killed” help to portray the image of the effects and feelings of warfare. In the novel All Quiet On the Western Front, Remarque does an impeccable job conveying the torturous misfortunes of war. Through the eyes of Paul Baumer, a young man shipped off to fight, a story is told of hopelessness and desperation on the front lines of WWI. As Baumer experiences starvation and injury among other hardships, the reader begins to comprehend how tragic a war really is. Once Baumer arrives, he immediately begins training while spurred on with the motto “kill or be killed.” He then realizes that he is no longer an individual man, but a