| Remarque
recreates vivid scenes of war through long, list like sentences. He
dramatically describes the horrors of war:
We see men living with
their skulls blow open; we see soldiers run with their two feet cut
off, they stagger on their splintered stumps into the next shell hole;
a lance-corporal crawls a mile and a half on his hands dragging .
. . The sun goes down, night comes, the shells whine, life is at an
end. (134)
The long list of images
in a single sentence brings the reader into the text almost
as if he were watching a movie.
As the reader navigates the sentence, he sees
each new image in the cinematic montage of the horrors of war. Each
image
happens simultaneously and the reader is almost overwhelmed by the images
bombarding him with death
and destruction. Death is everywhere. Then
Remarque allows the reader a chance to breathe: he closes the
sentence and
sums up the reality of war in a short concrete sentence. “The sun goes
down. . .
life is at an end.”
His simple language . .
.
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