Johnny Got His Gun example essay topic

dignity because he could no longer interact with other humans. It was the author's idea of the worst case scenario that could have occurred to a soldier who was injured. The description of his injuries gave the reader a picture of what it would be like to have lived with no legs, arms, or a face. It was a gruesome thought that helped personalize the story by making the reader feel bad for the main character.

At this time many perceived fighting in a war to be noble but for most of the soldiers it was anything but noble. Many times television shows, movies, and books had glamorized war, but that was not the truth. This book showed the harsh reality of war that most people didn't know existed at the time. War is something that no man should ever hope for, but young men were told that it was glorious to fight for your country. The reality was that they put their lives on the line every day to fight for their country. It may have been heroic but definitely not glamorous to kill another human.

In some cases, soldiers who were in wars had severe mental problems when they would return home from war because of the brutality they saw. When Joe finally became conscience of his surroundings he realized what had happened to him. Due to his injuries Joe was isolated from the rest of the world. This made it so that he didn't even know if he was awake or sleeping. He kept having flashbacks to the war and to his life previous to the war.

Then when he realized that his life was over he wanted to end it but he had no power to. He told others through morse code but they denied him death. The life that Joe Bonham led after his injuries was in no way glamorous but instead the worst possible way to live When I originally started reading this book I thought that war was a necessary part of our society to keep other countries in order, but now I realize that war serves no purpose whatsoever. It is just a waste of resources and life that could be better used. I still believe that we should have an army to protect us but I now feel that we should use more restraint when sending in military force. In most cases it is not necessary to shed blood in other countries.

I believe that our army should only be used in extreme cases when there is no other solution. In most cases it would be possible to resolve a problem without fighting but it is easier to just fight over it. Which unfortunately happens far too often in our society. Plus now with all of the nuclear weapons that have been created another huge war could end the world. Obviously this is not a good solution, which is why we must find other ways to solve our disputes.

This book changed my attitude towards war and the men who fight in them. As evidenced from the past tense verb in the title of the novel, Johnny Got His Gun takes as its focus the aftermath of war for a soldier, rather than the optimistic, patriotic prewar time frame upon which other novels-as well as the original song 'Johnny Get Your Gun'-focus. Although the novel remains clear about the fact that Johnny received his injuries from an exploding shell, Johnny does not ever think back to combat warfare. The novel takes as its opponent not combat warfare but rather the mentality of warfare and organization of modern warfare by the moneyed classes. Joe's memories related to the war, such as the Lazarus story, or the story of the man with a flap over his stomach, do not directly deal with warfare.

Instead, these various memories create a sense of the incomprehensible decay, injury, and pain that result from war. Joe remembers the stories with a wry tone that gives a sense of the absurdity of each of the situations-such as the rumor about the man who lost his face only to return home and die at his wife's hands. In this sense, the use of the war in the text remains true to its use in the title of the novel: the war exists as a precondition for senseless and grotesque injury and pain. Revisiting the Classics Johnny Got His Gun, by Dalton TrumboAvailable in a 1989 Bantam edition; 243 pages, paper, $6.99 Reviewed by Ethan Young When I first read Johnny Got His Gun I was in high school. It was the peak of the Vietnam war, and Phil Ochs's ong 'I Ain't Marchin' Anymore' was all the convincing I needed to join the peace movement.

But only the photos of napalmed children gave me any inkling of the real face of war, until Dalton Trumbo's Depression-era work upended my teenage dream world. Trumbo sought to write an argument against war that would sink into our memories and never leave. He succeeded with me and with everyone I've met who read the novel. Like many other rich and affecting modern works, it was inspired by World War I, the war that launched revolutions and forever rusted the cast-iron fantasies of the gilded age. But Johnny is distinguished from All Quiet on the Western Front or A Farewell to Arms in that it had the added historical edge provided by the experience of economic collapse following the postwar boom. Trumbo's war was not an abstraction, or simply a horrible experience, but an inseparable outgrowth of the capitalist system.

And even in a time when 'unbridled capitalism' is accepted as part of nature-like oxygen-and a sentiment like 'war is bad' is seen as a cliche in some circles, the work still burns through the veil of everyday denial. Johnny is the first-person narrative of a doughboy whose face, arms and legs were blown off at the front. The title is a response to the patriotic pop refrain of the war: 'Johnny get your gun, get your gun, get your gun... ' The Johnny in question was the product of an 'age of innocence,' a generation bred to live in ignorance of the bloodshed that lurked in the history of every secure little town and hamlet. Johnny was the healthy, idealistic young man ready to taste the world as only a full-fledged American boy could. The reader is witness to his unfolding realization of his condition as a 'basket case' (as victims of such injuries were called).

In the novel, as in life, the war rips Johnny to shreds and leaves him his memories, unanswerable questions and irremediable loneliness. Trumbo's point could not be clearer: War dehumanizes. Specifically, it dehumanizes you. The point is made repeatedly, but always in a different way; the reader is challenged, even screamed at, but never lectured. The narrative's black humor is exemplified by the doughboy's memory of 'Lazarus,' the corpse of a German soldier behind British lines, who will not stay buried despite valiant efforts by the brass. Lazarus is the U.S. sense of war: he is supposed to be 'over there,' destroying some other people's lives.

But here he is, his rot filling our nostrils, making us crazy as we try to pretend to ignore him. The comedy immediately shifts back into tragedy, not to make the reader suffer, but to create recognition of the psychosis involved in co-existing with war. Johnny Got His Gun is not a wholeheartedly pacifist novel. Like many social protest works of the 30's, it ends with a call to arms against the masters of war: 'If you tell us to make the world safe for democracy we will take you seriously and by god and by Christ we will make it so. ' The novel embodies the blunt, defiant anti-militarist spirit of Eugene Debs, Socialist Party writer Mary Marcy and Gen. Smedley ('War is a racket!' ) Butler, the much-decorated WWI general who later changed his mind about war. Shortly after the publication of Johnny Got His Gun, this spirit waned as support for the new war effort enveloped the majority of the Left.

(In 1947, Trumbo would become one of the 'Hollywood 10' who defied the House Committee on Un-American Activities and were jailed and blacklisted for their stand.) Then a generation later, along with that spirit, the novel resurfaced unexpectedly. They keep each other alive. Trumbo, who died in 1976, would have appreciated how quickly the hoopla for the Gulf War evaporated. His book played a part in that.

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