The map is not the territory, the sculpture is not the subject, and the sequential arrangement of black marks on a page or a white screen (or red ocher on a cave wall) is not the reality he is trying to describe. Every recorded human experience has been altered by transmission through the human medium, simply because with each passing letter, the author must select – and permanently record – one symbol and not another. The meaning of certain words changed over time, gaining and losing symbolic and allegorical meanings until the literal interpretation of a poem or story differed significantly from the symbolic interpretation. (1) Yet when an author finds the right word and gathers enough of it, he or she can do three very important things: Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an Original Essay First, the author can take a snapshot of a specific character's perspective and context in an authentic "realistic" environment. This, although somewhat doctored with the literary equivalent of PhotoShop, remains the best technique for capturing a person's generic experience, as it allows an author to agglomerate the experiences of many people in order to create a more complete with reality. Second, the author can describe themes and images that illustrate deep, abiding truths that transcend individual situations. Finally, the author can express feelings, ideas, and emotional responses that are simply impossible to convey using conventional historical analysis. It is impossible to know what a long-dead person actually thought or felt without speculating or extrapolating ideas based on primary sources. This essay will show how Erich Maria Remarque achieved these three goals in All Quiet on the Western Front.Remarque, by allowing one of the characters in the story to tell the story with his own feelings and thoughts, has access to more from just his personal experience of war. Note (born Erich Paul Note) actually served during World War I, having been drafted in 1916 and arriving at the front on June 26, 1917. He was wounded about a month later and ended the war working in the hospital . (2) His main character in the novel, Paul Bäumer, has the author's abandoned middle name, lost his mother around the same time that Remarque's mother died, and is also something of a writer. But while Remarque was enlisted, Paul and his classmates volunteered. With only a month in the trenches, Remarque could not have personally lived through a winter there or personally experienced all of Paul's experiences. Thus, although Remark is known for relying on personal experience in describing his characters and settings, Paul is not Remark's literary alter ego. (3) Yet it is entirely plausible that Paul's adventures could have been based on the memories or fantasies of other soldiers in the hospital where he served. The rules of the first person singular necessarily limit the narrator's consciousness to what the character is personally experiencing. This could have been a big problem if Note had not condensed the experiences of many real people into the story of one. By condensing reality in this way, a fuller picture of the facade is presented without sacrificing emotional realism. Is the book a truthful depiction of a real person's experience? Absolutelynot. Is this an accurate representation of what was really happening? Well, according to other readers who experienced the same trench warfare, and according to critic Walter von Molo, it was compelling and universal enough to be "unser Weltkriegsdenkmal" (5) or "our monument to the world war." episodic structure to capture the fleeting and disconnected emotional state of Paul and the other soldiers, and it uses symbolic language to encourage the reader to search for deeper, more allegorical meanings. Consider this example, which depicts the earth as primarily (but not entirely) a female entity. This passage anthropomorphizes the earth both as a poetic device and due to the structure of the German language, which requires a feminine pronoun for the word Erde, or earth: For no man is the earth so important than for the soldier. When he leans long and powerfully on her, when he buries his face and his limbs deeply in her for fear of dying from a shell, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in his silence and his security; she shelters him and frees him for ten seconds to live, to run, ten seconds of life; receives it again and often forever. (4) If Note had been limited only by the constraints of journalism, the type of editorialization observed in the passage above would have been extremely inappropriate. As part of his memoirs, Remarque could have described his own thoughts or feelings, but he could not have generalized in this way without entering the realm of speculation. But, as a general conclusion drawn by a fictional character, the characterization of Earth is not only acceptable but poignant. Due to the intimate nature of "Paul's" narrative, the reader has access to all of the character's emotions, thoughts, and opinions. Some of the conclusions drawn by Paul and Kat, such as the reasons for arbitrary and capricious orders given by officers in training or off the front line, are solely the product of the characters' reasoning. They may or may not be accurate. Paul definitely matures over time: he even forgives Himmelstoß. But the emotional immediacy and contrast between Paul's concerns about his cold hands in chapter 2 and his apathy in the final chapter bring the characters to life and provide ways for readers to emotionally identify with them. Although most people have never survived an artillery bombardment or starvation, everyone has experienced fear and loss of control. Compared to relying solely on objective facts about what people said and wrote, having access to Paul's inner world creates a much more accurate illustration of what people said and wrote. what a human being in his situation could experience. Even Paul doesn't always say or express what he thinks, and neither do real human beings. So, capturing the total experience, inside and out, is only possible through fiction. Note, in All Quiet on the Western Front, offers personal experience rather than conjecture about what an infantryman “might” have felt. He makes liberal use of metaphor and poetic language to encourage deeper and more universal interpretations of the work, and he condenses the experiences of many human beings into a more universal Everyman. These factors, taken together, allow him to create a more accurate and universal representation of life in the trenches than would have been possible if he had limited himself to his own memories. So, although the voice of Erich Maria Remarque has been quieted by the grave, Paul Bäumer will live forever. and fragments of other ideas. Terry.