A Deconstruction of Erich Maria Remarques All Quiet on the Western Fro

A Deconstruction of Erich Maria Remarques all tranquility on the Hesperian FrontThe young soldiers depicted in Erich Maria Remarques text All Quiet on the Western Front re move over a generation without precedent, constancy, or forethought. The men, answering their elders calls to become national heroes, have lost their white on the battlefield and remain forever altered in impression and spirit. Remarque contrasts the cold realities of war in the bounty to the tranquility of the past in order to illustrate the psychological transformation of the men stationed on the figureheadlines. The soldiers advance trapped in the empower and alienated from their pasts however, deconstruction of the text rejects the present and past as opposing states of time and identity, and reveals them as related conditions that argon intimately and permanently intertwined.Much of the critical literature regarding All Quiet on the Western Front concerns the binary relationship mingled with the symbol s of present and past. For example, critics Barker and Last assert This rupture with the past is one of the nearly dominant themes of Remarques work, the discontinuity of life, this jolting from one place of existence to another, for which man is solely unprepared (54). This opposition is represented in Remarques descriptions of the contrasting environments of present and past.? The present is depicted as a state of unpredictability, uncertainty, and impermanence in which the soldiers further exist on the edge of life. The narrator, Paul Baumer, imparts the dismal desperation of the front Shells, gas clouds, and flotillas of tanks--shattering, corroding, death. Dysentery, influenza, typhus&8209scalding, choking, death (Remarque 283). In contrast, the past is... ...between the present and the past. shaping symbols, customs, and allegations of the past, both real and perceived, provoke a human battle between rival notions of an ideal present. Literary deconstruction approaches a t ext in much the same manner, confronting and dismantling fixed signs, traditions, and assertions. Yet like war, a deconstructive reading does not provide a final answer or the ultimate truth.Works CitedBarker, Christine, and R.W. Last. Erich Maria Remarque. London Oswald, 1979.Culler, Jonathan. On Deconstruction. fresh York Cornell University Press, 1982.Leitch, Vincent. Deconstructive Criticism. New York Columbia University Press, 1983.Remarque, Erich Maria. All Quiet on the Western Front. New York Ballantine, (1928)1958.Wagener, Hans. collar Erich Maria Remarque. Columbia University of South Carolina Press, 1991.