Why Do I Have to Read THIS?!

I have to write an analytical paper about the war story book All Quiet on the Western Front. While typically war stories are easy to analyze because they combine extreme situations, the nature of human society, and usually the typical loss of innocence angle, this particular story is convoluted. The character's all have similar names and the narrator keeps shifting events out of chronological order. I told myself that war veterans write this way because it's how they remember their dramatic history; that turned out to be a load of baloney! All Quiet on the Western Front turned out to be Fiction... inspired by life experiences, not that 'this story didn't really happen, but characters and plot points are sort of inspired by things that happened to this one guy' is written anywhere on the book. Lies! Inexcusable, poorly written lies! Why is this book the focus of our analysis? The Things They Carried was actual Non-Fiction and was written in a way that actually draws in and engages the reader... as opposed to making the reader all too aware that they're painfully reading a depressing book of made up stories pretending to be real.