Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo

First published: 1939

Type of plot: War

Time of work: The first two decades of the twentieth century

Locale: Shale City, Colorado; Los Angeles, California; and a hospital room in an unknown country

Principal Characters:

• Joe Bonham, a bomb blast survivor, horribly disfigured
• Coreen, Bonham’s girlfriend before his departure to war
• Bill Harper, Bonham’s childhood friend
• Nurse, a faceless figure who comes to understand Bonham’s attempts to communicate
• José, a Puerto Rican who works with Bonham in a Los Angeles bakery

The Novel

Johnny Got His Gun is a modified stream-of-consciousness narrative occurring in the mind of a soldier whose arms, legs, ears, eyes, nose, and mouth have been blown away in a bomb blast during World War I. Written by Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, the novel is told using cinematic techniques, particularly in book 1, “The Dead,” which is a fusion of flashbacks and soliloquies in the mind of Joe Bonham.

Awakening in a hospital bed, Bonham first remembers the announcement of his father’s death. Recalling sensory images of his youth, Bonham slowly realizes the extent of his injuries, and he has flashbacks of the night before he left for war, when he made love to his girlfriend, Coreen. In a montage of sounds, Joe recalls his parting words with Coreen, which were mixed with phrases from political speeches and the lyrics from the song from which the book draws its title. This description captures the excitement of the moment and the flavor of the times and also establishes the political backdrop against which Bonham eventually rebels.

As he realizes each loss from his body, Bonham remembers a youthful incident that emphasizes the loss. Each flashback is told in the third person. Joe’s present circumstances are related in the first person as he explores the sensations within his body. Unable to communicate, move, or sense the outside world beyond his limited perceptions, Bonham reviews times with past friends and family, including his attempt to escape a broken love affair by working on a section gang in the desert. He recalls the betrayal of his best friend, Bill Harper, who had stolen Bonham’s first girlfriend. Bonham remembers a fishing trip with Harper and his father and describes scenes of his mother’s cooking.

In between these memories, signaled by fade-outs in the narrative, Bonham’s mind moves through varying psychological states as he explores the extent and ramifications of his wounds. Describing his world in short, simple sentences, he first sees himself as returning to the womb, entirely dependent on the feeding tube in his stomach. His inner battles include the inability to distinguish between dreams and reality. He struggles to control his dreams to avoid insanity. He measures his loss first in physical terms, then realizes that he is a prisoner of his mind and must be able to respect his own thoughts. His narrative breaks into fragmentary sentences when he discovers that he is losing his sense of time. Bonham begins to measure his life by the warmth of the morning sun and the visits of the nurses who change his bandages and bathe him.

Book 1 is largely set in the past. Book 2, “The Living,” records Bonham’s thoughts as he begins to consider himself dead, with the mind of a living man. After exhausting all of his youthful memories, Bonham late in the narrative begins relating his war experiences, noting that it was in September, 1918, that he was hit by an exploding shell in his foxhole. He believes that four years have gone by, and he now has a sense of place and knows what is happening in his room. His thoughts turn from memories to imagination, as he pictures the making and movements of the bomb that hit him. He has a nightmare of Jesus Christ in Arizona where, at a poker game reminiscent of the Last Supper, Jesus announces that Joe will lose his limbs and face in a bomb blast.

In the book’s most moving and eventful section, Bonham discovers that he can communicate by tapping his head in Morse code on his pillow, but none of his nurses seems to understand his motions. He believes he is beginning to go insane, unable to escape the trap of his own thoughts, becoming the ultimate prisoner unable to respect his own thinking. His surreal dreams include becoming a Carthaginian slave during the Roman Empire. He comes to believe that he is the symbol of every one who has been enslaved or imprisoned.

A new nurse begins tracing letters on Bonham’s chest, and he realizes that she is telling him “Merry Christmas.” He finally gets her to understand his Morse code tapping, and someone replies by asking him “What do you want?” He is surprised because he can now communicate, and he reflects before giving his answer. Bonham replies that he wishes to go on tour as an educational exhibit—a tangible statement that “This is War.” His contact with the world turns to conflict when he receives the answer to his query, “This would be against regulations.” He tries to communicate but is drugged to keep him from asking questions. His last thought before becoming lost in the drugged fog is “Why?” With this abandonment, Bonham loses hope and succumbs to rage. The book concludes with a lecture on the future. Bonham sees himself as a harbinger of things to come and as one who must be silenced so future wars will have their soldiers.

The Characters

Dalton Trumbo’s third novel was both innovative and difficult to write. The entire book is set in the mind of one character who can recall people from his past in vivid detail but is unable to describe visitors to his hospital room except through the sensation of touch. As Bonham himself realizes, he is more a symbol than a man, but Trumbo successfully uses a range of human experiences to make Bonham believable, fully developed, and able to grow despite his extraordinary circumstances.

Joe Bonham is not simply an “everyman” but is drawn from Trumbo’s own experiences. The character was named after Trumbo’s father, Orus Bonham Trumbo, and Bonhams’s youthful memories of Shale City, Colorado, and Los Angeles were based on Trumbo’s years in Grand Junction, Colorado, and his nine years as a night worker in a Los Angeles bakery. Trumbo uses these settings to establish Bonham’s essentially innocent past, and the flashbacks not only tell what life was like in a small town but also reveal what it was like to be Joe Bonham before the war. One important passage in the bakery focuses on José, an honorable Puerto Rican, whose attempts to lose his job are more than an anecdote to help flesh out Bonham’s education. José is a strong, solitary loner whose strength prefigures Bonham’s own forced exile as a silent, solitary hero. Other characters also act as contrasts between past and present. For example, Coreen’s repeated pleas for Joe not to leave foreshadow his doom.

Bill Harper, his childhood friend who betrays him by stealing his girlfriend, is a character who establishes Bonham’s youth as largely that of an average American boy. In the juxtapositions of past and present, he also represents the life Joe can no longer live. Harper symbolizes the people whom Bonham does not want to see him in his diminished condition. Instead of being comforted by his family and girlfriend, he is surrounded by hands that touch him in pity or revulsion.

In one pivotal scene, faceless men surround Bonham, and one of them kisses him on the forehead and lays a medal on his chest. Joe is repulsed by the act but aware that he cannot communicate his disgust to the officials, who can offer him nothing of substance. This limited interaction with humanity both reinforces Bonham’s separation from humankind and demonstrates how human he remains.

Critical Context

Johnny Got His Gun was first published two days before the outbreak of World War II in Europe and was quickly serialized in the communist newspaper The Daily Worker. It was immediately popular with critics and the public and was embraced by the American Civil Liberties Union and right-wing pacifists. Trumbo elected not to reprint the book until after the war was over despite its winning of the National Book Award in 1939 and the American Book Sellers Award in 1940. He wrote that there are occasions when the individual voice must give way to a greater good, in this case the defeat of fascism. He was not pleased by many of the supporters of his book whom he considered subversive.

In 1949, Trumbo became a symbol of individual freedom when the House Committee on Un-American Activities headed by Senator Joseph McCarthy blacklisted him. As the most prominent member of the “Hollywood Ten,” moviemakers who refused to cooperate with the committee, Trumbo was cited for contempt of Congress and served a one-year prison sentence. As a result, when Johnny Got His Gun was reprinted in 1970, the author was known as a courageous spokesman for individual rights, lending the novel a new credibility during the Vietnam War. Actor Donald Sutherland read passages from the book at antiwar demonstrations, and disabled veterans found the novel particularly affecting. Quadriplegic Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic cited the novel as having influenced his own Born on the Fourth of July (1976), a book later made into a motion picture.

In 1972, Trumbo directed the film version of his novel; although the film received lackluster response in the United States, it earned eight international awards and drew comparison with other powerful cinematic statements on war such as Paths of Glory (1957) and Catch-22 (1970).

Bibliography

Cooke, Bruce. Dalton Trumbo. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1977. Describing Trumbo’s life and career, Cooke provides useful insights into the composition and response to the novel and film version.

Kovic, Ron. Introduction to Johnny Got His Gun, by Dalton Trumbo. New York: Citadel Press, 1991. In this twelve-page response to Trumbo’s novel, Kovic points to the importance of the book to the veterans of the Vietnam War, particularly those with extreme injuries.

Trumbo, Dalton. Additional Dialogue: Letters of Dalton Trumbo, 1942-1962. New York: M. Evans, 1970. Though it makes little mention of Johnny Got His Gun, this collection illuminates Trumbo’s thoughts and friendships in the post-World War II years.