Johnny Got His Gun

I hope you read the copy of Johnny Got His Gun with the foreword by a mother, Cindy Sheehan, who lost her son to war. Her anger is palpable in every sentence she wrote. Her foreword throbs with an abundance of seething words. She ends with the largest question in the human lexicon - why?
Joe. What a brilliant name for a character. Just your average Joe. Joe is every man. Joe is the average man. Joe is your son. Your brother. Your father or uncle. Your husband or boyfriend. Joe could be your world. Told in flashbacks of better days, Joe was your typical teenager before World War I; he grew up with a good friend, he liked to go fishing, he had good parents, he had a best girl. Then everything changed when adulthood set in. Joe lost his show more best girl to his best friend. Later he left behind a perfect girl when he shipped off to fight the good fight in World War I. Did want to fight? Maybe. Did he want to become a "piece of meat" with no arms, legs, eyes, ears, or tongue? Unable to move anything but his head, unable to see, hear, or speak? Most definitely not. Joe's incremental realization of the loss of his limbs, sight, hearing, sense of smell was terrible. Even when he wants someone to end his life he cannot get relief. As an audio book it was even more devastatingly painful to hear. I do not think I would have been able to finish it if I had to read it only in print. show less

5/5

Truly remarkable and unlike anything I have ever read before. This is stream of consciousness style (devoid of a single comma) perspective of a World War I veteran who awakens in a hospital after he is hit with a mortar shell to find that he is both a quadruple amputee and missing all of his major sense except for touch. Joe's brain is fully functional, but he is locked into body that can merely roll around on the table, fully reliant on others for all of his needs. It's a terrifying prospect, and Joe is prone to bouts of psychosis, suicidal ideation, and raw animalistic panic as he comes to terms with his new reality. Between periods of lucid exploration of the present, Joe reminisces about the life that he had before his injury and show more the war that caused it. We get to know how he ended up as a doughboy in the trenches, what he left behind and what his dreams were. Though this is categorized as fiction, Joe is based on a real life veteran of the war who experienced much the same thing.

It is both riveting and horrific. I had a hard time putting it down and finished it in the course of twenty four hours, simultaneous repelled by the graphic representation of misery yet unable to stop myself from reading more. Sort of in the same vein as a car crash, there is a level of voyeuristic interest that propels the novel forward. There's hardly a plot to speak of really, just Joe discovering his limits, regaining a sense of time and his surrounding over time through the smallest indicators, like the subtle change in temperature on his skin.

Johnny Got His Gun is a purely pacifistic novel. Trumbo doesn't waste time by going into the minutia of the war, instead he rejects the notion of war wholesale as unconscionable. Anything is better than death. Nothing can possibly justify war, nothing is worth losing your life over. Especially when what you're fighting for is abstract ideas like democracy, freedom, or other moral values. Especially when who you're fighting for is the politicians that have made decisions for you, who tell you that your death is worthwhile. No idea, no government, no ideology is worth dying for, because death is the worst thing that can possibly happen to you.

Ironically, Johnny Got His Gun was picked up by the American right-wing, pro-nazi isolationists as a text through which they forwarded their movement to stop America from getting involved in World War II. This is especially funny considering that Trumbo was member of the American-communist party, and was blacklisted from Hollywood in the 1940's and 50's, though apparently was also an isolationist that supported the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Johnny Got His Gun has some similarities to works like Nineteen Eighty-Four, where parties across the political spectrum claim ownership of the text and use it as a support to their values. show less

This is a re-read -- after a number of decades -- because I wanted to see how it stacked up, in the end, against Sebastian Barry's A Long Long Way. Trumbo's novel had been the exemplar for all anti-war novels, in my mind, until I read Barry's work a few weeks ago and he redefined my perception of excellence in this genre.

Joe Bonham is what Willie Dunne might have become, it struck me, as I was re-reading Johnny if he had not succumbed fatally to that final shell impact. There's the same strong rhythm of agony and torment driven by the complexity of damnation and hope in the face of eventual, and assured, death. The layers of complexity are so intricately layered, that you move from anguish to relief simultaneously in the same paragraph, show more sometimes in the same thought. It really is possible, in the end, to hold two thoughts in your mind, at the same time, with equal intensity, and not become completely mad: that is the the anguish of war. To want to fight, and defend, and stand true to one's principles; and equally, to want to run like hell and find a rabbit hole, and never come out. Both Trumbo and Barry achieve this complicated equilibrium and never let up.

Trumbo's anguish is more punchy and didactic, much like the assured rhythm of a machine gun, delivering bursts of energy and fatal information all in one. Barry on the other hand, is more operatic where the orchestra sometimes slows, but never stops completely, and then moves on to new crescendoes.

Both are dazzling works of invention that dance so close to the truth it is indistinguishable from it; both deliver the same message, that war is hell and why do we do it; both are vital and indispensable works against the Great War Machine. show less

Johnny Got His Gun is an uneven novel perennially redeemed by its great central concept. Taking his title from the patriotic war lyric "Johnny get your gun", meant to encourage young American men to join the army and fight in World War One, author Dalton Trumbo tells the story of a young man who did get his gun and go. But there's a "difference between a war that's in newspaper headlines and liberty loan drives and a war that is fought out lonesomely in the mud somewhere a war between a man and a high explosive shell" (pg. 224). Trumbo's main character Joe Bonham has lost all of his limbs, his jaw, his hearing and his eyes due to a shell burst, but has survived. This is the endpoint of war, once the drums and bugles have died away.

As show more you can imagine, there's no room for subtlety in Trumbo's story, but for the most part it works. It works particularly well as an anti-war tract; so potent is the appalling image of Joe, alive but unable to interact or communicate, that at its best moments Johnny Got His Gun makes you swear off not only support for any form of war, but off any sort of harm to others. It is a tragic, wretched, depressing story of the young man trapped in this body, all but dead, and his attempts to establish communication, like a man buried underground screaming that he's alive (pg. 212). The message is diluted somewhat by Trumbo's willingness to use it as a political football (a lifelong Communist, Trumbo railed against the book's ban when pacifism was all the rage among the left-wing, but suppressed it himself when the Soviet Union was invaded in 1941, and right-wing isolationists found common cause with it), but even these knocks can't diminish it to any considerable degree.

Where Johnny Got His Gun struggles is as a novel. The writing is often good – in that naked lucidity that righteous rage often generates – but there's a bit too much chaff in this literary wheat-field, and it's fatiguing to follow some of Trumbo's digressions. The monologue of Joe Bonham as he lies mute, blind and crippled in his hospital bed is fine – you accept this isn't going to be a nippy, plot-driven story right from the start – but Joe's lengthy reminiscences of his happy past are, frankly, dull. There are bland, drawn-out memories of working in a bakery, living on a farm, courting girls, and even a long retelling of the Mary and Joseph story from the Bible. It's all tolerable, I guess, but it's filler.

The sometimes-artless content is particularly frustrating as some promising literary avenues aren't followed. For example, the start of chapter 3 talks about Joe's exhaustion within his prison body, but doesn't tie the feeling ("A man can't fight always" (pg. 25)) to the obvious wider theme of pacifism. There are good moments, such as when Joe imagines himself talking to dead soldiers in a sort of purgatory, only for them to agree that Joe has it worse, which makes it frustrating when some of the other dots weren't joined up. The supporting characters don't have much presence, and the tender relationship with the nurse who finally establishes communication with Joe has less depth than it has in the film adaptation (also by Trumbo). But, as I said at the start of this review, Johnny Got His Gun, in its flaws, is always redeemed by that horrifying, uncomfortable central concept. It's not always a strong story, but it is always a worthy one. show less

This is _the_ anti-war novel. A stream of consciousness tale that is ultimately beyond horrifying, leaving you numb and almost unable to process exactly what it was you just read. You will think about Johnny long after the last words are read and wonder just why is it anyone ever agrees to go to war.

This is one of the most horrifying – and terrifying – anti-war novels I’ve ever read. Dalton Trumbo did an absolutely amazing job of allowing his readers to”identity” with Joe Bonham, the book’s protagonist. An astonishing literary work.

“Then how could a guy lose his arms and legs and ears and eyes and nose and mouth and still be alive?
How did you make any sense out of it?”

Pretty much sums up the theme of this book. A young man, flung into war, wakes up to the above situation and while reliving his life, struggles with the horror of his predicament. It's more like a horror novel than a war novel, considering the condition of the poor man.

I enjoyed this read but didn't love the ending. I felt like I needed more closure.
And I'll tell ya' what, on a personal note - I maybe shouldn't have read this just one week before I go in for back surgery. I'm not comparing that to what the young man in this book woke up too, but it would be a nightmare for me to wake up next week show more without the ability to move my arms and legs! So, if you are facing any kind of surgery, don't read this book until after!!! show less