Characters Look To Joe example essay topic

Johnny Got His Gun Johnny Got His Gun is a striking literary work about a young man, Joe Bonham, and his internal struggles following a devastating war injury. He lost his arms, legs, and face. Dalton Trumbo, the author Johnny Got His Gun, allows the reader to know Bonham's thoughts, but nothing more. The reader follows Joe's progression toward and away from insanity, and between hope and despair.

Trumbo shows this progression through the use of a plethora of literary techniques. Characterization is one of the most extensively used techniques. A great deal can be understood about Joe's feelings and thoughts by seeing how he interprets characters. The reader ponders many ideas when thinking about characterization used in this book: reality of characters, stereotyping of characters, and motivation of characters. In order to make sense of this book, the reader needs to assume at least one character to be real. Joe is most easily assumed real.

The crux of this book is criticism of war, and the criticism becomes most apparent if Joe is real. Reality of other characters is difficult to distinguish. The people Joe remembers are real, at least to him. He has memories of their personalities and what they looked like. He can recall specific memories of events with these people. There are also characters Joe encounters while he is lying in his bed after the accident.

These characters are very flat. They do not develop, and we know little about their thoughts or emotions. Joe only knows about them what he can tell by the feel of their footsteps and their hands. There are characters such as the rat that the reader cannot tell are real or not.

At first Joe believes the rat is real, but then decides it is not (Trumbo, 94). In fact, the reader has no way of knowing what is real and what is not. The reader can only guess from Joe's observations. In Joe's physical and mental state, what Joe assumes to be rats could be nurses, and what he assumes to be nurses could be rats. Or they could all be careful experiments designed by scientists to look at the reactions of their new toy. The reader needs to carefully examine Joe's observation of characters to make this decision.

There are subtle stereotypes throughout the novel. Joe believes the nurse with the heavy footsteps and hard hands to be a middle aged woman with graying hair. The nurse with soft hands is a young, beautiful woman. Joe can be stereotyped as a 'slut'.

He discusses many different girls he has slept with, and he rarely conveys any feelings of true love toward them. Joe is constantly having an internal battle about whether he is a piece of meat or not. He struggles against himself trying to decide if the doctors are atu cally trying to help him, or if he is some kind of accomplishment. Joe sees characters as motivated by many different means. He is often quite cynical, believing that doctors think of him as an experiment or a trophy instead of a patient.

He thinks they are working on him for their own glory instead for his best interests. Another interesting character is his father, who symbolizes true love. When Joe loses his father's fishing pole he is worried about what will happen to him. Joe's father tells him that time with him is much more valuable than any fishing pole.

Joe is motivated to return from the war to be with his girlfriend Kareen, who encouraged him to dodge the draft. When he first becomes aware of his injuries, he thinks about Kareen, and how his ring being removed from his body symbolizes her being removed from his life. Joe makes decisions about characters motivations and sticks by them. It is interesting to notice that he was exposed to positive motivations as a youth, but following war experience, often assumes the worst in people. Dalton Trumbo expresses his feelings about war through the characters that are developed from Joe's memories and experiences. Trumbo does a good job showing the reader how characters look to Joe.

It is easy for one to believe they are actually in Joe's mind. The reader of this book can see the messages Trumbo is trying to convey by looking at the characters and answering questions about reality of characters, stereotypes of characters, and motivation of characters.