The map is not the territory, the sculpture is not the subject, and the sequential arrangement of black marks on a white page or screen (or red ocher on a cave wall) is not the reality it attempts to represent. Every recorded human experience has been modified 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 meanings of some words have changed over time, gaining and losing symbolic and allegorical meanings until the literal interpretation of a poem or story differs substantially from the symbolic one. (1) Yet, when an author finds the mot juste and puts together enough of them, he can do three very important things. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't 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" setting. This, although modified somewhat with the literary equivalent of PhotoShop, is still the best technique for capturing a generic person's experience, because it allows an author to agglomerate the experiences of many people to create a more complete representation of reality. Second, the author can depict themes and images that illustrate profound and abiding truths that transcend individual situations. Finally, the author can express feelings, ideas, and emotional responses that simply cannot be conveyed using conventional historical analysis. It is impossible to know what a long-dead person really thought or felt without speculating or extrapolating ideas based on primary sources. This essay will show how Erich Maria Remarque achieved all three of these goals in All Quiet on the Western Front. Remarque, by allowing one of the characters in the story to tell the complete story of his own feelings and thoughts, has access to more than just his personal experience of the war. Remarque (born Erich Paul Remarque) actually served in World War I, having been drafted in 1916 and having reached the front on 26 June 1917. He was wounded about a month later and finished the war working in a hospital. (2) The novel's main character, Paul Bäumer, bears the author's discarded middle name, lost his mother around the same time as Remarque's mother died, and is something of a writer himself. However, while Remarque was enlisted, Paul and his classmates volunteered. With only a month in the trenches, Remarque could not have personally experienced a winter there or personally experienced all of Paul's experiences. Thus, although Remarque is known for drawing on personal experience in his character and setting descriptions, Paul is not Remarque's literary alter ego. (3) Yet it is entirely plausible that Paul's adventures may be based on the memories or fantasies of other soldiers in the hospital where he served. First-person singular rules necessarily limit the narrator's awareness to what the character personally experiences. This could have been a big problem if Remarque hadn't condensed the experiences of many real people into the story of just one. By condensing reality in this way, a more complete image of the front is presented without sacrificing emotional realism. Is the book a truthful description of a real person's experience? Absolutely not. Is this an accurate representation of what was actually happening? Well, according to other readers who experienced the same trench warfare, and according to thecritic Walter von Molo, was sufficiently convincing and universal to be “unser Weltkriegsdenkmal”, (5) or "our World War monument". Remarque uses episodic structure to capture the fleeting and disjointed emotional state of Paolo and the other soldiers, and uses symbolic language to encourage the reader to search for deeper, allegorical meanings. Consider this example, which describes the earth as a predominantly (but not entirely) female entity. This passage anthropomorphizes the land both as a poetic device and because of the structure of the German language, which requires a feminine pronoun for the word Erde, or land: To no man does the land mean so much as to the soldier. When he presses himself on her long and hard, when he sinks his face and limbs into her for fear of dying under a grenade, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and security; she protects him and frees him for ten seconds to live, to run, ten seconds of life; he receives it again and often forever. (4) If Remarque had been limited solely by the constraints of journalism, the type of editorializing seen in the passage above would have been extremely inappropriate. In the context of a memoir, 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 from a fictional character, the characterization of Earth is not only acceptable but touching. Because of 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 Paul and Kat draw, such as the reasons behind the arbitrary and capricious orders given by officers during training or away from the front lines, are solely the product of the characters' reasoning. They may or may not be accurate. Paul certainly matures over time: he even forgives Himmelstoß. But the emotional immediacy, and the contrast between Paul's worries about his cold hands in chapter 2 and his apathy in the final chapter, bring the characters to life and provide readers with ways 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 have demonstrably said and written, having access to Paul's inner world creates a much more accurate example of what a human being in his situation might experience. Even Paul doesn't always say or express what's on his mind, and neither do real human beings. So capturing the total experience, both from the inside and the outside, is only possible through fiction. Remarque, in All Quiet on the Western Front, offers a full experience of the person instead of conjecture about what an infantryman "might have" felt. He makes liberal use of metaphor and poetic language to encourage deeper, more universal interpretations of the work and condenses the experiences of multiple human beings into a more universal Everyman. These factors, together, allow him to create a more accurate and universal depiction of life in the trenches than would have been possible if he had limited himself to his memoirs. Thus, although Erich Maria Remarque's voice has been quieted from the grave, Paul Bäumer will live forever. Final notes(1) “There is no concept that is not involved in an endless game of meanings, crossed by the traces and fragments of other ideas”. Terry Eagleton, expounding ideas attributed to Jacques Derrida. Eggleton, Terry. Literary theory, an introduction..