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,
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
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