Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton
Trumbo
The Greatest Book About The Realities Of War
Experiences of a severely disabled World War I veteran which relates the
horrors of war.
Personal Review: Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo
At the end of Johnny Got His Gun there is a fantastic line uttered by the
protagonist that sums up the entire experience of reading the novel:
"That would be a great thing to concentrate war in one stump of a body
and to show it to people so they could see the difference between a war
that's in newspaper headlines and liberty loan drives and a war that is
fought lonesomely in the mud somewhere a war between a man and a
high explosive shell."
Dalton Trumbo's greatest triumph with Johnny Got His Gun was boiling the
entire anti-war argument of the novel into that single horror: an armless,

legless, faceless, eyeless, voiceless casualty screaming at you for mercy.
If you favor military action in any form, can you justify the victories in the
loss of life and limbs?
Needless to say, Johnny Got His Gun still resonates so effectively today as
it did when it was first published in 1939. Look at any photographs of Iraq
war veterans with severed limbs and the same question still confronts you:
is the war worth the cost? It is that focus that keeps the novel from drifting
into long-winded speeches or diatribes. Because we never see the world
outside of Joe's mind, we are trapped in the argument of "Why? Was it all
worth this?" Therefore, the novel never feels preachy. Nor does the anti-
war argument grow dated -- because it is not rooted in World War I (where
the action takes place), or World War II (which the novel was released just
prior to), but in the moral argument against war itself.
Trumbo also does a superb job of making Johnny Got His Gun a "small
novel." It is not trying to encompass all the horrors of war, but just this one
soul-wrenching example. You cannot help but cringe along with Joe when
he feels a rat gnawing at the side of his body as he lies helpless on the
hospital bed, unable to swat it away. As the reader, you share Joe's
isolation and helplessness.
And yet, from this horror, Trumbo is even able to bring forth great humor.
Take the scene of Christ playing cards with the soon-to-be-dead soldiers.
He performs a minor miracle by making full whiskey glasses appear
beneath each player (a sort of mock of the water-into-wine trick), but then
winds up losing a hand of blackjack ("I never could hit a twelve he said in a
complaining voice").
Throughout it all, Trumbo never lets you off the hook. You must look at Joe
and see his fate. To look away (or stop reading in this case) is to deny the
realities of war and its ultimate cost.
Without giving away the ending, the book outdoes the movie (which
Trumbo himself directed) in that it doesn't over-argue the point. The sad
resolution is not discussed as a great moral quandary, but rather a matter
of regulations. Ultimately, the army's regulations turn a blind eye to the
truth that lies before them.
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