Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Johnny Got His Gun
Book Review: The quintessential anti war book written in 1939.
Summary: 5 Stars
The quintessential anti war book written in 1939. Based on World War I--the war to end all wars, Dalton Trumbo creates a character, Joe Bonham, who survives a bomb blast in a very singular way. He loses all four limbs, his hearing, his speech, his taste--left only to thin--and feel vibrations and touch.
Trumbo goes further when he adds:"But his latest thing, this inability to tell dreams from thought was oblivion. It made him nothing and less than nothing."
This average Joe can't tell what has happened in his prior life (flashbacks) from dreams or his present reality.
The idea of the book is to describe the worst possible way to survive a war injury, because in doing so, Mr. Trumbo makes war a despicable thing.
"Hell's fire guys had always been fighting for liberty. America fought a war for liberty in 1776. Lots of guys died. And in the end does America have more liberty than Canada or Australia who didn't fight at all?"
Mr. Trumbo takes this regular Joe and leads us through his thoughts about the concepts of liberty, decency, honor, country, and principles in general. The heroe's answer is: "There is no word worth your life." "Nothing is bigger than life. There is nothing noble in death."
The second part of the book deals with the acceptance of Joe's condition. He starts by tracking time by the way the heat hits his face in the morning, the nurses that interact with him. Once he figure how to tell time: "if you can keep track of time you can get a hold on yourself and the world but if you lose it then you are lost too."
After succeeding in telling time, now a few years later, his mind decides that he might be able to communicate with the outside world. tapping his head S. O. S. for several months he finally has a breakthrough when he gets a new nurse during the Christmas holidays. The nurse took off his robe and traced in his body "Merry Christmas"
He thought that for the first time in many years "he was not alone."
This nurse alerts the hospital staff who come and ask Joe "What do you want"
He just wanted to get out--he wanted to be a symbol of what war could do to people so that governments would think harder before deciding to go ever go to war again.
The official answer was that it was "against regulations."
He understood: "He was the future he was the perfect picture of the future and they were afraid to let anyone see what the future was like. Already they were looking ahead they were figuring the future and somewhere in the future they saw war."
Book Review: Unforgetable and Haunting
Summary: 5 Stars
I read this a young man, and the images it conjured up will haunt me forever. The horror and frustration are unforgetable, and the writing is crisp and vibrant. The ending is both persuasive and lucid and may not turn a war hawk into a pacifist, but it will surely set anyone to thinking.Book Review: Why? Why? Why?
Summary: 5 Stars
This is the story of Joe Bonham, a young American man, who was dragged to a war that he didn't understand. Injured, paralyzed, and without all but his sense of touch, Joe tries to figure out what happened to him and how to communicate with a world that doesn't see or understand his suffering. Joe's intense, but intriguing journey through his own mind to the ultimate political maturity is amazing.
This novel was written over 60 years ago, and it is still relevant to this crazy time of wars, dragging young men into blind killing orgies and splitting people into those blindly loyal to their government, and shocked betrayed citizens. You will want to explore this novel, enjoy the great ideas behind small symbols and ponder the image of a rat eating the face of a dead soldier. Rats and big parties are the only beneficiaries of war.
This is a timeless master piece laying bare that monstrous invention of humanity, WAR