War and cynicism
Chuck asked yesterday whether war shows that "life comes down to a struggle for power" and whether that struggle is therefore "not entirely justified." Throughout our discussion, I've wanted to deny that Remarque is acquiescing to a kind of Darwinian principle that meaning or meaninglessness is determined by the powerful who makes such decisions as going to war and dictating the shape of powerless people's lives.
As we come to the end, I have to ask myself why I've resisted the cynical view. Doesn't all the evidence point to it, especially when I go outside the novel and consider the "real world"--the helpless people of Darfur or the Afghan civilians caught between the Taliban and NATO forces? Maybe All Quiet does aim at leaving us with a feeling of total bleakness, but an argument can also be made that Remarque was writing as much to the powerful as for the powerless. Chuck, I'm thinking particularly of your point about the British general at Passchendaele who was incredulous that he could have been responsible for such a battle.
It is surely the case that a sense of desperation grows in the novel as rumors of an armistice circulate and as Paul's comrades continue to fall or lose touch with any sort of reality, such as when Detering becomes obsessed with cherry blossoms or Berger is seriously injured while going into No-man's Land to put a wounded dog out of its misery.
Paul's best friend Kat represents the extreme instance of war's last-minute irony. At the beginning of ch. 11, Paul gives his most eloquent testimony to the comrade-love we've talked a lot about: "It is a great brotherhood," he says. "...a condition of life arising out of the midst of danger, out of the tension and forlornness of death--seeking in a wholly unpathetic way a fleeting enjoyment of the hours as they come. If one wants to appraise it, it is at once heroic and banal...." Kat himself is the next to last victim, killed by a splinter to the head as Paul carries him on his back to what he thinks is safety behind the Front.
Could Remarque have made the end of his novel any more darkly ironic? At the end of the war, the fragment that would have killed Paul kills his best friend Kat instead and saves his own life. But for what? Now there is only one of the seven left, and in the last few pages we get the last of Paul's personal account, beginning with "I stand up." Where? In the trenches that he has said have deteriorated to the point of being little more than shellholes? He stands up to face his death? He continues: "I am very quiet. Let the months and years come, they can take nothing from me, they can take nothing more. I am so alone, and so without hope that I can confront them without fear. The life that has borne me through these years is still in my hands and my eyes. Whether I have subdued it, I know not. But so long as it is there it will seek its own way out, heedless of the will that is within me." Total quiet. Like a still life.
Is this last glimpse of Paul alive a portrait of despair or something else--courage or resignation or resolve? Some other culmination he's come to? Then the narrative twist at the very end: the sudden shift to the third person and report of Paul's death. A purist might well object: no fair to take us from 300 pages of the intensely personal to this view of Paul lying dead! What is Remarque doing with this radical shift in point of view at the very end?