Johnny Got His Gun

Paternity and the relationship between the father and son reflects mutuality, correspondence, endearment, a test of masculinity, and the collaboration of men. Explored in many medium of literature, in specificity novels, such as The Road by Cormac McCarthy, Open by Andre Agassi, and Mudbound by Hillary Jordan, the kinship between male elder and male junior proves to be a testament of the complexity and fluctuation between love and hate. Dalton Trumbo, most notable for being blacklisted by the House Committee of Un-American activities for allegedly participating in the Communist Party, demonstrates this father-son complexity with envy, nostalgia, and bittersweet moments in his 1939 classic, Johnny Got His Gun. Moreover, the narrator refrains from using quotations or be specific in who is communicating to really engrave the audience and the narrator themselves in understanding the tension and somber now that his son is soon departing to fish with someone else. Through imagery, foil, character development, rhetoric, point of view,
Constructing this story first with the campfire is the cliché atmosphere for the bonding of man and his offspring. Significantly, the selective detail of the pine falling from the tree foreshadows the similar genealogical-biological proverb, “the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree”. Building on this mutuality, the audience can infer the strain that will soon occur between the father and the son. Nature alludes to the genealogy between man and father. When the narrator expresses, “when you slept inside the tent it seemed always that it was raining outside because the needles from the pine kept falling…,” one can conclude the agony that will soon come from the one who inflicts this pain. Conclusively, the imagery reflects a correlation, but a sense of authority and