all quiet on the western front book ending

The memoir approach of the novel does not have much of a traditional plot, rather it is a series of vignettes, with the clearest progression being the one by one deaths of Paul’s friends in the trenches. The screenplay of the 2022 film version won a BAFTA for its adaptation of the novel, but there are some key additions and omissions to the original work. The phrase ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’, translated from the German ‘Im Westen nichts Neues’ (Nothing New in the West), has become a popular English idiom meaning little is happening. It went on to win 8 BAFTAs, including best film and best director, while also receiving 9 Oscar nominations – and all for a budget of $20 million.Įrich Maria Remarque’s anti-war novel was published in 1928, and sold 2.5 million copies in its first 18 months, along with being made into another Oscar winning film version in a 1930 release. Perhaps the speaker is another soldier who discovered Paul's body ends the tale? And who was sensitive enough to look at his face and see that calm? Was it that obvious? And did this person find Paul's account of the war and choose to finish it for him? So many questions.The newest film version of All Quiet on the Western Front was released in October 2022 with a rapturous reception for its gritty realism and cinematography. So who could be speaking now? All of Paul's best friends have died.

The question on our minds, however, is who narrates this last paragraph? Until this point, Paul has narrated the entire novel. How tragic that fighting on the Front was so horrific that Paul is relieved to die. The 'expression of calm' on his face makes us feel like he had found his peace in the end. The fact that he dies on a relatively peaceful day suggests to us that he either welcomed death, or that he was so unused to calm that he had grown too accustomed to violence to know what to do in a quiet setting. By the end of the novel, we've witnessed the hellish bombardments Paul has survived in which bullets, shells, and gas surround him like a swarm of bees. We detect a bit of irony in the way that Paul dies on a quiet day, a day when there isn't much action anywhere else on the Front. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come. He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Take a look at the last two paragraphs of the book: He fell in October, 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.

The novel's epigraph and the ending sing the same tune.

All quiet on the western front book ending