- Published: January 4, 2022
- Updated: January 4, 2022
- University / College: Lancaster University
- Language: English
- Downloads: 26
This is to analyze and discuss the book `Johnny Got His Gun` by Dalton Trumbo The thesis of the book was to tell the horrors of war and its futility that it was better to become a slave than to serve the war in name of intangible things. This paper will describe the experienced of the main character that has lost his senses in a senseless war in the sense that what they are promised when they are sent are intangible promises like freedom and democracy. For the main character to have lost his faculties to war he did not chose but to fulfill an obligation to country just expressed in deepest instances that intangible things are invaluable to one who has no senses except the pain. Johnny Got His Gun is a story of a man who one day found himself perplexed and has to work out from the reality that he has more senses except the sense of touch.
It was unique of kind of surviving without both arms, both legs, his eyes, ears, nose and mouth and one horrible could have caused it – it was War. To suffer such fate when it was not one’s choice to join the cause of the war, to be sent only in war because there is promise of democracy and liberty could only be the most unacceptable thing to happen as Joe Bonham, the main character of the story may have found himself into since losing sense could only amounting to death. Understanding a man without sense expect sense of touch To understand a man without almost all senses one would see great learning from the book as it vividly explores what happens to a mind that was cut off from the outside world except for a sense of touch, pain and of vibration. Seeing nothing but darkness, hearing nothing but noise, saying nothing but murmurings there could only be few possibilities.
The author was so brilliant to paint the inevitable option of the mind’s choice, that is to think and to absorb any piece of information that it could bump into when there are no more things to think or perhaps when thinking has never stop, patience should only be the virtue that it knows. But there is great danger in pure thinking without variation; there could be boredom, as there are not many activities to explore but perhaps the mind’s realizations that it also has no option why would it bother to think of diverting. Psychologist could have only thought of frustration to that man. Perhaps fortunately the brain is still the center of every thing as it could live at its own to sustain its activities.
A normal person is said to have the senses to gather information for the brain to function. Thus typically the eyes could send information to the brain to process. A normal person could direct his eyes to see the green leaves or to see beautiful places to entertain the bind and remove itself from boredom. But was not only the one that was lost. The absence of the other senses would paint the same deprivations or perhaps to even a greater extent as the absence of the sight.
What seems so unfortunate is the fact that only the sense of touch, pain and of vibration was left. It is the part of the senses that is made to feel the hurting and uncomfortable. What could have happened if a frustrated mind could not find ways to entertain it self. It will have to find something to blame or perhaps the find its reasons for its existence. And so the author of Johnny Got His Gun could have come to realize to think one greatest man’s folly that has come to visit humanity and that is war. Littell and Littell, 1846, Schmidt, 2005) This is therefore a book against war, and took the position of being a pro-revolutionary oppositionist that argues against the cause of war or joining it especially the government through decision making that would unknowingly draft to war innocent young men and women who will only to be killed in the name of things they cannot really eat like freedom democracy or other ideas that man may seem to value.
If one would speculated on how could the mind of a previously healthy twenty-year-old man come to, after unluckily have become a victim of war and only his brain with still as sense of touch and pain that is left of him survive? How could he have communicated to the outside world must really a wonderful thing to find out. Joe as expected did still find a way to communicate in the pages of the book but being attentive for so long periods with only himself to receive a respond that he did try to bring out same stream of perception that has been his own personal speech for the past years. What he has developed as values in early years before becoming a victim of the war like his patience may only have to give in then to an extreme anxiety. Well in the book a sort of getting mad after the event was not a surprising statement One could have compared the experience of Joe to one lying in bed beside a phone which keeps on ringing and Joe could not simply arise even to respond.
What could he have wished is for the phone would stop ringing instead so that it could be more peaceful and perhaps he could just sleep. A part in the story made it happen that Joe could answer the phone but to his surprise, it was to tell him about his father having died. With his head pounding, Joe answered the call to receive the news from his mother and he knew that answering the phone by experience before the war. All of a sudden a big reality came to him that was just dreaming. What could have been more painful was the fact that the mind still creates experiences which are no longer possible simply because Joe was invalid. After waking from that dream he realized he is covered in bandages from head to toe, that he cannot hear anything at all that is real, and that he cannot see anything at all.
But the writer of the book has brilliantly motivated to read that despite Joe’s deafness that phone that he had dreamed of still keeps on ringing and he still wanting to answer that but how could that be when Joe is so horrifically injured. He just simply he cannot move anymore forever more. Is there other options, none because he simply just lost all the sense except the sense of touch and that could make him to be passive. To become passive must have really brought his spirits to still fall further because it entailed powerlessness to the extreme.
Certain relevant excepts from the book Joe having been blown up by an artillery shell in France during World War I, could only have suffered much because of the has his suffering could be further appreciated by taking important excerpts from the book. A part of the book vividly painted it: “” He was a dead man with a mind that could still think… He could tell them mister there’s nothing worth dying for I know because I’m dead. There’s no word worth your life. I would rather work in a coal mine deep under the earth and never see sunlight and eat crusts and water and work twenty hours a day. I would rather do that than be dead. I would trade democracy for life.
I would trade independence and honor and freedom and decency for life. I will give you all these things and you give me the power to walk and see and hear and breathe the air and taste my food. You take the words. Give me back my life. ” (Trumbo, 1998, 153).
One could only see regret in life to have survived trying to make choices that should have been there. But he was sent to war in the name of “ freedom” and “ democracy” (Dittmar and Michaud, 1990; Hunt and Rygiel, 2006) which he never enjoyed. A dead man that could still think would be just a like a comatose patient that could be allowed to die by euthanasia because of the futility of further administration of medicines. There is no hope for recovery. He has considered himself dead and since he practically admitted death, death has no more stings to him.
Joe was in a sense complaining because he has given everything in exchange for democracy, independence, honor, freedom and decency but then he has lost his life with the loss of his senses. Another part of the books that is worth reflecting upon is the excerpts which said, “ You had plenty of time to think. You had time to figure things out. Things you’d never thought of before. … You were so completely alone on your hill that noise and people didn’t enter in your figuring of things at all….
It seemed that you thought clearer and that your answers made more sense. And even if they didn’t make sense it didn’t matter because you weren’t ever going to be able to do anything about them anyhow. ” (Trumbo, 1998, 142). To talk of utter uselessness of his Joe’s reaction, it would appear there is no use to reacting to non-sense things to be corrected because of his lack of senses to communicate to the outside world.
In other the presence of communication is within himself alone. It could thus be described a forced “ solitude. ” Conclusion It may concluded that the book Johnny Got His Gun is anti-war book that dramatizes the reality the reality that everybody losses in war. And to see the experience of Joe is to see the unfairness of man’s folly in sending young men and women to war (Dittmar and Michaud, 1990; Hunt and Rygiel , 2006) in the name of intangible things as lost senses could not be brought back, and yet the intangible thing is still nowhere as far as Joe is concerned. This paper was to make the link of the main character’s unique experiences in relation to the consequences of the loss of his senses in a senseless war.
In short, the main character is saying what he was promised when he was sent to war are intangible promises but for him to have lost his faculties to war he chose not to have but to fulfill an obligation to country. Thus Joe has all the right to ask to bring back of the lost senses because of the war in exchange for restoration of his lost senses but it was too late. His only capacity now is to feel the pain.