Johnny Got His Gun
Dalton Trumbo (1939)
243 pp.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Johnny Got His Gun. How did I not ever read this in high school? It’s the perfect teaching book. And weirdly timelessly eerie in its statement of the effects of war, of young life lost. Although written theoretically about WWI, it’s a kind of timeless book that could be about the physical and psychological impacts of war on any young person. It also got the author (who was also a screenwriter) blacklisted in the McCarthy era, so it’s worth reading for that alone.
What is interesting to me, and how this relates to other reading I’ve been doing lately (though I didn’t know it when I picked it up) is that (warning: spoiler coming!) the only character in the book is blast victim who is a quadruple amputee who has lost his ability to see, hear, smell and talk. The book is really his interior monologue as he figures out how to live life in this new state – the moat frustrating part of which is that he can not communicate with anyone. Nor does anyone caring for him know whether he is conscious or not.
Similar to Mind Wide Open and Rattling the Cage, the book makes you think for a moment about what it means to be human and to be conscious. Or rather, Johnny Got His Gun becomes interesting in light of having read these two other books because not for a moment do you wonder if the protagonist is human or conscious, even though he can not longer perform any function that one would associate with human-ness or consciousness, typically.
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