All Quiet On The Western Front

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of sorrow.” This sums up his entire disposition towards himself at the end of the novel. He was taken into the army, willfully, but still taken, in the prime of his youth, to a place where death and destruction were facts of life. Remarque depicts a transition in the value systems of Paul and his comrades. Kemmerich’s boots, symbolic of a horizontal value system, can be seen to have considerable influence over those in the novel. However, Bäumer comments, “…Müller would rather go bare-foot over barbed wire than scheme how to get hold of them [boots]… the boots are quite inappropriate to Kemmerich’s circumstances…Müller can make good use of them.”, the shift to a horizontal value system, based on materialism and hard-core usefulness, does not necessarily lead to a degradation of humanity. This change in value systems can be seen clearly on page 21, where Paul describes his and his friends’ enlisting to the district commandant. ...

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