Johnny Got His Gun By Dalton Trumbo: A Literary Analysis

In today’s society, the consequences of war are infamous. People have seen time and time again the gruesome outcomes of war’s merciless ways, whether it be by seeing mangled friends and family who were injured in battle or witnessing the breakdown of a veteran with PTSD. Unfortunately, the reality of war was not always spread to those going to fight in one. Whether it be the lack of communication technology in the civil war getting information to the public, or the excessive propaganda romanticizing World War 1, the general public has repeatedly been blinded. However, many of these ideas would not be so widespread and known the way they are today without help from literature and films. The World War 1 novel, Johnny Got His Gun, by Dalton Trumbo,
follows a young soldier, Joe, who experiences brutal injuries from war. As he lives in the hospital as a vegetable for five years, he comes to realize that he did not really understand why he decided to go to war in the first place. He regretted letting himself be led astray by the masters of war to believe that war was a wonderful experience. On the other hand, the 1960 American Civil War movie, Shenandoah follows the Anderson family as they try to avoid the war. One of the characters who is called Boy, accidentally ends up in war by being mistaken for a soldier when wearing a soldier's had he had found. He gets shot in the leg and reluctantly survives to make it back home to his family. In both cases, the characters were surprised that something like that could ever happen to them. Although Joe and Boy end up in war for different reasons, they both represent how the general population has oblivious to the true consequences of war on more than one occasion. Both the characters Boy and Joe were given their names for a reason.
Their names are generic and, in Boy’s case, his name is never even mentioned as he is only addressed as ‘Boy’. In a way, these names stand out because of how hard they were made not to stand out. Why does this matter? Because these characters are meant to represent the countless of others that ended up in similar situations as them. As more similarities are discussed, it is important to know that both Johnny Got His Gun and Shenandoah were not meant to share a personal experience of a character, but a problem occurring on a wider
scale. An issue that both characters encountered was not truly being aware of the brutal physical and mental damage a war can bring.
This was expressed in Johnny Got His Gun on multiple occasions. One of the primary examples being the fact that Joe suffers throughout the entire story from the loss of all four of his limbs, his eyesight, his hearing, and half of his face from an explosion. War was glorified with propaganda during World War 1 so many people like Joe entered with the idea that it would be an incredible experience. Many people like Joe also realized very quickly that it most definitely was not. Joe felt absolutely helpless for the majority of the story because he was no longer able to grasp a sense of time or when he was even awake or asleep. His physical injuries brought mental challenges as well. He came to realize that to be happier, “He had to stop things from fading away and then rushing back at him. He had to stop the smotherings and the sinkings and the risings. He had to stop the fear that made him want to yell and holler and laugh and claw himself to death with a pair of hands that were rotting in some hospital dump” (Trumbo 80). These are things that people would not think of everyday under normal circumstances, or even be able to prepare for when going into battle. In Shenandoah, Boy is not led into the war by propaganda but captured by mistake. However Boy entered the war as clueless as Joe did. His family, for the most part, believed that it was not their
war to fight. Him being only 16, he was not told about all the dangers of the war. Every gruesome scene is completely new to him, and he does not know what to make of everything. When he ends up being thrown into battle he gets shot in the leg, and only survives reluctantly with the help of one of his old friends. Consequences of war that both characters also had to deal with was the loss of loved ones. Joe suffers through losing everyone that he loves because he is incapable of communicating with them, or with anyone that could help him for that matter. His requests to the doctors through morse code were all ignored, implying that nobody may ever help him contact his family. Many of Joe’s flashbacks are centered around his nostalgia of home, and knowing that he has probably lost that part of his life forever. His mother and her singing is an important thing that represents a lot of the comfort and warmth of his home life. For example, he remembers the time “His mother was singing in the kitchen. He could hear her singing there and the sound of her voice was the sound of home” (15). Joe never imagined that he would end up in his condition, and now he is trying to cope with the loss of everything he loved about his home. He had always had some sort of expectation of returning home, being with his family, and getting married because war propaganda planted a false seed of hope into his head. He now lives the rest of his life isolated with his own thoughts and the few that will listen. In Shenandoah, Boy also suffered through the loss that came with war. By the end of the film, he is still not yet aware that he has lost some of his older brothers and even a sister in law. Nevertheless, he will live the rest of his life with the fact that they all died young because of some war he did not even know much about.