All Quiet on the Western Front Chapter 2 Analysis

Packaged along with the coming of age is the realization of the past. Every day leads a person closer to death and farther away from the easy days as a child. And when forced to mature faster than should be, childhood becomes nothing but a memory, if even that. The young boys in All Quiet on the Western Front, written by Erich Remarque, have only the faded recollection of their youth to cling to. It’s what gets them through the horror of war, the pain of loss, and the disturbance surrounding the unknown tomorrow. Despite the causalities and suffering, the remembrance of their past is what they cling to in order to preserve their innocence.

 

At only 19 years of age, these soldiers are only children themselves, but are forced to mature when put in the face of danger and given the responsibility to keep themselves and each other alive. The event that seems to make the biggest difference in their lives is not the drills from the corporal or the protection from a dirt wall, but death. It’s the death of a friend who was deceived into believing that the war had, “an ideal and almost romantic character,” (Ch. 2) that alters the way they view the world, if only for a moment. This loss is what brings the young men to reflect on the years when war was nonexistent in their minds, when they were only naive, innocent children. While witnessing the hopelessness and bereavement of his dying friend, the narrator recollects those times, thinking to himself, “I have copied his essays. At school he used to wear a brown coat with a belt and shiny sleeves. He was the only one of us, too, who could do the giant's turn on the horizontal bar. His hair flew in his face like silk when he did it,” (Ch. 2). The past is the only way that these men can find the beauty in each other and in themselves. Surrounded by suffering and death, youth is the only thing that remains pure. It’s the constant repetition and reminders of the splendor of infancy that provide the only escape to set their hearts free.