Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front
is full of incidents which dramatically change characters' perspectives on
all kinds of things.
When Paul goes home, he has several
changes in persepective. He realizes that people do not understand (largely because of a
successful government propaganda campaign) that this is an awful, gruesome war and they
are not winning it. Though he suspected it before, Paul realizes there is nothing here
for him after the war--if he comes home alive.
Throughout
the novel, soldiers who arrive at the front lines are continually shocked and often
traumatized by the experience. What was a tidy and glorified ideal is now a horrific and
terrifying reality. Death is near and greedy.
Experiencing
death in some way is always an occasion for a change in perspective; and plenty of young
men, both strangers and friends, die in this novel. The events which trigger such a
change do not always need to be terrible; what they must be is life-changing, and this
is a novel of many such events.
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