All Quiet on the Western Front | Themes
In All Quiet on the Western Front, two themes that dominate the plot and complement each other are war and the "rites of passage." In literature, war often becomes the proving ground on which a youth is initiated into one of the rites of passage — as instances, Crane's The Red Badge of Courage (1895) and Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (1929). Paul Baumer candidly relates his own initiation into war and, as typical of rites of passage, he gains knowledge from his experiences. He says that when he and his twenty classmates enlisted they "were still crammed full of...
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