All Quiet on the Western Front

In All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque jumps around a lot in order to show what war is really like and how uncertain it can be. This is showed by going from a scene where Paul and his comrades are relaxing and eating, straight to a scene on the front line where there are bombs flying everywhere and it is utter chaos. Remarque does a very good job in portraying the war as a survival game for the men fighting. Most of the men don't really want to kill the men they are fighting against, they just want to make it out alive. Most of the men, including the main character Paul Baumer, entered the war right out of school, so many of them don't have any clue what they will do when the war ends. The novel ends fittingly, with Paul dieing very peacefully, knowing the end to his nightmarish war has finally come.

The Martian Chronicles

The Martian Chronicals by Ray Bradbury is about the human population colonizing Mars. The book has many science-fiction short stories put together to form a novel. Throughout the book the humans colonized Mars in a way very simalar to the way the early settlers colonized America. The martians were also treated in much of the same way that the Native Americans were treated. The humans came in and made Mars a new America, with many of the same characteristics of their old society.Bradbury describes the planet of Mars very poetically and uses sharp imagery to describe many things. The people on Mars were shipped back to Earth to be used in the atomic war towards the end of the book. Then in the last section a family cames to Mars to start a whole new civilization with no traces of Earth on it. This is Bradbury's way of saying that a new place should not be colonized based on previous civilizations but should be started anew.