devastation of war catch 22 and all quiet on the westerm front
The Devastation of War War is not only a battle against another, but also a battle against oneself. War is an endless, exhausting, and nightmarish business without relief or purpose. In the novels All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque and Catch-22 by Joseph Heller the true reality of war is seen through the eyes of the soldier. ... In both novels, the experience of war, whether in the midst of the trenches or away from the line, creates drastic changes in the soldier’s questioning of war, his options, and the final decision he makes. In the first novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, the soldier’s questioning of war is drastically altered. He no longer sees the war as just war, but starts to consider its purpose. For one thing, there is no variety to war, people live and people die. It is this simplicity that makes war so dangerous. The only variety that exists in war is the type of angish that the soldiers have to face. “To me the front is a mysterious whirpool. ... ” (55) This is how Paul thinks of the front. At the front, he lives on instinct. ... He and his companions simply let animal instinct take over at the front. ... They have loved ones at home, death is a constant fear, and they also must experience the same severity of the war. A critic of the novel explains the genreral behind the war in All Quiet on the Western Front. “On this long pilgramage, so often ghastly and ferocious, there is more than the routine of the trenches…Perhaps most important there is the inner drama – the fever that rises and falls in the souls of the fighters as the war goes on.” (Hill, 325) The war in “All Quiet” extends much further than just the actual battle between the soldiers, but also to the internal fight of the men in the trenches. The soldier’s questioning of was also appears in the second novel, Catch-22. This time the soldier questions the purpose of the war rather than the war itself. ... A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries usually unnatural. ... There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can’t all be worth dying for.” (257) The war began with Germany attempting to conquer and occupy as much territory as possible, and only until the great European powers and the United States entered into the war was that advance halted. ... One of the major themes in both novels, like most other war novels, is the essentiality of death in war. However, in Catch-22, this theme is more universal throughout the minds of the soldiers. ... But that was war. ... “Modern war in Catch-22, says a critic of the novel, appeals essentially to be an adminisrator’s war, the focus having shifted from the exigencies of combat to the rampages of bureaucrats whose method of communication imply a new species of epiphenomenalism.”(Walsh, 202) No longer is the war in Catch-22 a battle among the soldiers, but it has now transformed into a war between the leaders of the army. ... While questioning the war, the soldiers in Catch-22 begin to show their feeling through the dead. ... It doesn’t make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who’s dead.