"Johnny Got His Gun" by Dalton Trumbo, Reviewed by Sara Falls

I was twelve the first time I read Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun.  I was a heavy metal fan, and Metallica’s first music video of “One,” based on the novel, piqued my interest.  Twenty-two years later, rereading it felt like reading it for the first time.  I’d remembered nothing except the premise and the power of that premise: a man lies in a bed, the casualty of war; no arms, legs, sight, hearing, or speech.  Fragments from his life float into his consciousness, and he struggles to make meaning of his life and how it got him to this point. 

Dalton’s story and prose live up to the power of this premise.  The book is not only an angry tirade against the rhetoric and realities of war; it’s also beautiful at times, sad, and continually relevant.

Trumbo’s introduction and addendum (written in 1970) explain his struggle over the banning and censorship of the book and his work.  Johnny Got His Gun was published two days after the beginning of World War II, and it is virulently anti-war.  Joe Bonham, Trumbo’s symbolic narrator, contemplates his utter lack of liberty and how rhetoric of war led to his condition.  He thinks, “America fought a war for liberty in 1776.  Lots of guys died.  And in the end does America have any more liberty than Canada or Australia who didn’t fight at all?...Can you look at a guy and say he’s an American who fought for his liberty and anybody can see he’s a very different guy from a Canadian who didn’t?”  He contemplates his own war that trapped him in his body, his coffin, “a dead man with a mind that could still think,” and asks, “The war was to make the world safe for democracy…for everybody.  If the war was over now then the world must be all safe for democracy.  Was it?  And what kind of democracy?  And how much?  And whose?”  These continue to be relevant questions that any supporter of our continued military actions in the Middle East should at least consider.

The book works powerfully as an anti-war novel.  However, it’s also more than this.  It’s also a story about the importance of human connection and communication.  Bonham, unable to speak, hear, or sign, discovers his ability to communicate with his nurses and doctors using Morse code.  When he finally breaks through after years and is able to communicate with a nurse, he contemplates how utterly happy he is: “His legs that were smashed and gone got up and danced.  His arms that were rotted these five six seven years swung fantastically free at his sides to keep time with the dance.  The eyes they had taken from him looked up from whatever garbage heap they had been consigned to and saw all the beauties of the word.  The ears that were shattered and full of silence rang suddenly with music.  The mouth that had been hacked away from his face and now was filled with dust returned to sing.”  All this because of the very small notion that he could “take a tiny little idea in” his mind and “put it into her mind two maybe three feet away.”

Trumbo’s own life mirrors this narrative, the yearning to connect and communicate and the silencing that comes from those in power feeling threatened by what that communication might say about them.  He was one of the Hollywood Ten and blacklisted due to his involvement with the Communist Party.  The novel works on all these levels: emotionally it is impactful; symbolically it still resonates; and it is lyrically and beautifully written. Seventy years later it is still an important novel.