What does it mean to be an adult?

Growing up, innocence overtakes youthful minds, creating dreamlike versions of reality. Everything is perfect and nothing could possibly go wrong, for the toughest decision that had to be made was who would be today’s playmate at recess, or what color crayon would successfully complete the latest masterpiece. This innocence however, slowly begins to fade, as magic no longer remains the center of creation. In the novel All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Remarque proposes the question as to what was the cause of this loss of youthfulness. What could have possibly transformed easygoing children into savages on their road to adulthood? Remarque’s character development makes it clear that the reactions to traumatic experiences and possible hardships along the way remain the main factor that truly separates the boys from the men.

Paul, a boy nearing the end of his teenage years, takes his love for his country to the battlefield, risking his life as he chooses to do so. “[He] [is] twenty years old; yet [he] [knows] nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow.” (263) Upon enlisting in the war, Paul never thought that a lack of food, painful wounds, and death of not only the enemy, but comrades as well, would come along with it. He drives himself nearly to insanity as he soon becomes comfortable with the sins that he is committing. While on the front he experiences his first true killing stating, “This is the first time I have killed with my hands, whom I can see close at hand, whose death is my doing.” (221) Granted, “Life is short;” (139) however, when it comes to an end, which would a soldier rather have flash before his eyes? His great memories? Or rather the murders and wrong actions that he has achieved? These experiences and the process of acceptance afterwards is what illustrates the level of maturity necessary in order to successfully complete the transformation from childhood to adulthood, a transformation that Paul and the rest of the men in his unit, have greatly failed.