Points Summer Book Club

King Lear is the most argued-over of Shakespeare's tragedies. On the one hand, some say it's totally dark and hopeless, lacking any reference to Christianity; on the other, some say a few of the characters enact the Christian virtues and therefore affirm spiritual realities in ways that institutions never could do.

In this regard, I feel drawn to the part in ch. 7 when Paul goes on leave. Yes, they have been changed into beasts during battle, and "chance hovers" while the fighting goes on, but Remarque gives us an opportunity to measure Paul (and by extension his comrades, I suppose?) when he is with his family, friends, and townspeople far from the front. He's anything but a beast here; in fact, he's incredibly sensitive and seems to have a different and more humane standard for dealing with people back home than they have in dealing with each other. He lies to his mother about how things are at the Front and later to Kemmerich's mother, too. But it's to spare them. Should he not lie? It anguishes him to feel a gulf between his father and himself, but he knows that it's the way things are now--Paul knows more now than his father does, and his new wisdom restrains him from talking "of such things."

What is the "veil" (p.160) that falls between him and them and can't be removed? He's not contemptuous of them (as he is the martinet of a major who harasses him for not saluting); rather, he grieves at his alienation and separation. He regrets that he cannot "be here too and forget the war," but the quiet life behind the Front also "repels me, it is so narrow, how can that fill a man's life, he ought to smash it to bits..." (169). A little further on he goes to his room, but the great books, the classics, don't speak to him any more, even though he sits and waits for them to.

Far from being a beast, if anything he feels and knows too much. But what's wrong with this picture? Anything that is not the war is "narrow." War, then, must invert everything, turn it inside out and upside down.