Foresight

Author's Note: This is a response to Chapter two of the novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque. The theme of foresight was apparent in this chapter, and I believe that being an adult often deals with our ability to look ahead in life and to imagine what could happen next.

Youth is merely fancy nomenclature for the fog that surrounds our future and envelops our childhood. Youth acts as a barrier and it prohibits us from stepping beyond our current stage and into the doorway of hope. Youth does not encompass a certain age, but it holds all those who are frozen in time, unable to look ahead. In the novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, author Erich Maria Remarque paints the picture of foresight on a canvas of adulthood while swiftly flicking brushes of reverse syntax, thus proving that much more than age is needed for maturity.

Stolen abruptly from their childhood, Paul Bäumer and his school friends are forced into an early adulthood of war, but adults they are not; rather they are scornful boils of immaturity sticking out in a sea of maturity. Barely twenty years old, Paul and his friends feel out of place in a weary world of waning wonder and waxing warfare. Men fill their ears with tales of the past and hopes of the future, while they sit silently still, their eyes blinded to anything but their current situation. As Paul remarks upon his past, he notes that his generation has always seemed stuck in the present, and that, “Beyond this our life did not extend. And of this nothing remains” (20). Youth blinds Paul from foresight, and his reverse syntax further explains this sightlessness because his words imitate his life – trapped in reverse, unable to move forward towards a bright future. Although Paul’s birth certificate states the age of an able-bodied adult, he has yet to enter his mature years. Without the ability of foresight, he will never cross the threshold from child to adult, because he has yet to imagine where he could go, what he could do, or who he could be.