Character Analysis : Johnny Got His Gun By Dalton Trumbo

When he was little his mom died, and his dad remarried to a woman named Thula. Thula did not like joe and she kicked him out when he was only ten years old. “She declared that she would not live under the same roof as joe, that Harry must choose between him and her. She said Joe would have to move out if she were to stay in a godforsaken place. Joe was only ten years old” (Brown 86,87). I never could understand how someone could kick a child out of the house and force them to live on their own when they are ten years old. As Joe grew up the more he needed his family, but his family was not there for him, at least not his biological family. When Joe made the rowing team that's the day that he got a new family, even if he did not know it at the time. So was Joyce, a beautiful girl who loved joe and they were going to get married and start a family of their own. “When joe stopped playing they talked about what it would be like when they were married and had a hoe and maybe kids” (Brown 102). Making the rowing team and meeting and falling in love with Joyce might have been the best thing that has ever happened to Joe. As soon as everything start going good for Joe, Thula gets an infection and dies. Not that it was a good thing that she died, it was very sad, but it brought Joe and his dad back together again. Harry wanted Joe to move back home with him and the kids. “I’m going to build a house where we can all live

Joe grows as a character throughout the book, his life began at a very young age when his mother Nellie died of throat cancer, this left Joe growing up without having a good mother figure in his life. Not only that, but Joe was also really sick at a young age by contracting scarlet fever. So he would be staying at his aunt Alma’s home, where he was raised as a young child. Later on when he turned five years old, he went to go back to living with Harry and his newly wedded wife Thula. “Harry Rantz packed his family into his Franklin touring car and headed northeast, to the mining camp where he had been working as a master mechanic for the past year.” (Brown 71). The longer Thula and Joe lived together, the bond between them

The similar theme is that war changes people and tears them apart due to the pain and suffering of the war. “Cursing the war, cursing himself, cursing everybody”(O’Flaherty 208). The quote helps show that the war may cause you to curse things you never would've before, like, yourself. And from the poem “He thought he’d list perhaps/ Off hand like just as I/ Was out of work, had sold his traps/ No other reason why”(Hardy 16-20). This tells how war can force people to make erratic decisions, it changes your attitude and morals about any situation including joining the army and going to war. The difference between the two stories is that in “The Sniper” it turns him against his family and in “The Man He Killed” it turned the soldier against his friends. To prove this, “Then the sniper turned over the dead body and looked into his brother's face”(O’Flaherty, page 208). Again this tells of the shock the sniper received when he saw it was his brother he had killed. But in the opposing story “Yes, quaint and curious war is!/ You shoot a fellow down/ You’d treat if met where any bar is/ Or help to half-a-crown”(Hardy 17-20). It explains of how he killed a man that the soldier would have befriended in any other situation. All in all, you can see both the similarities and differences in both stories

In the wise words of Charlie Anderson, “[I]f we don’t try, we don’t do. And if we don’t do, why are we here on this Earth?” Charlie Anderson is the protagonist in the movie Shenandoah, who lives with his six sons, Jacob, James, John, Nathan, Henry, and Boy, and his daughter, Jennie. Charlie Anderson is the type of person who responds to everything by trying and giving it his all, but only if it concerns him. The movie takes place during the Civil war, which occurs near their family farm and Charlie’s intent was to stay neutral because he felt that the war did not concern him, until his youngest son, Boy, was mistaken for a union soldier and taken by the confederate army. Charlie ventures off with five of his sons and his daughter, while James and his wife, Ann, and their baby stay back at the house. Along the way, tragedy strikes the family, affecting them in ways that cannot be undone. The protagonist in the novel Johnny Got his Gun, Joe Bonham, was drafted into the war and greatly injured as a result. Joe experiences a loss of his eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and limbs. The only thing that Joe is left with is a working brain and very little ways to communicate with the outside world. As the novel progresses, Joe faces an immense amount of internal conflict and struggles with the effects that war has on him. Although both Charlie and Joe experience the harsh impacts of war, they respond to them in quite different ways.

There is no doubt that war is evil in every way. It is full of hatred and conflict and nothing comes out of it. It brings death, destruction, and the worst out of people. In a pacifistic yet desperate tone, Dalton Trumbo promotes anti-war ideals by explaining the life of a young soldier after he got affected by war in his novel Johnny Got His Gun. While some individuals’ point of view match with Trumbo’s, others may disagree with his reasoning. The controversial issue of the acceptance of war is talked about everybody, even popular artists. Some singers express their opinions on war via their songs, like George H. Cohan in his song “Over There (Johnny, Get Your Gun)”, and the band Metallica with their song “One”. Each sends different messages depending on the setting, their music’s genre, and diction used in the making of the lyrics.

Copious bullets, like that of torrential downpour, reign over the battlefield; a setting in which man created through dispute, engulfs each and every individual caught within it. Some are immediately spun into a downward spiral, while with others, it hits them in the midst -- even if they have built an immunity to war’s ways. Two fictional characters, both sharing a similar atmosphere, experience the true affects to war in their own ways. Although war never changes, the individuals do, no matter the situation. This is exemplified through the fictional tales, told by Liam O’Flaherty’s “The Sniper,” as well as Tim O’Brien’s “Where Have You Gone Charming Billy,” and as the main characters are to each their own story, they bear contradistinction to one another in the aspect of war, personality, and the emotional reactions to war.

At the beginning of the book Joe starts to truly realize how destroyed he is as a man, “My arms are gone. Both of my arms are gone Kareen both of them. They’re gone. They’ve cut my arms off both of my arms. Oh jesus mother god Kareen they’ve cut off both of them. Oh jesus mother god Kareen Kareen Kareen my arms” (38). Just by reading this excerpt, the sad cries and absolute desolation of Joe is apparent through the use of repetition. Trumbo first repeats “my arms are gone” multiple times before switching clearly to repeating “they” and finally to repeating “Kareen”. He does this to powerfully ingrain and fix a dilemma, before placing the blame and then showing how hopeless this situation really is. Trumbo’s use of repetition was very well organized in the sense that they pressed these ideas into the reader by repeating them and highlighting the theme. The last use of repetition serving purposely to show what Joe is emotionally going through by repeating “Kareen”, representing how Joe has become almost like a child, or not in a powerful enough state to do anything about his issue. Trumbo emphasizes the helplessness of being drafted and forced into abhorrent situations again, “He too had been taken away from his home. He too had been put into the service of another without his consent. He too had been sent to a foreign country far from his native parts. He too had been forced to fight against other slaves of his own kind in a strange place” (183). Here, the repetition of he, referring to soldiers but more so just the average man, is repeated here to emphasize how regular people are forced like “slaves” to fight for people who are higher up. This strongly resembles like the quote above, just like a child and their parents earlier, where Joe repeatedly cries out for Kareen like a child begging for help. Really, Dalton does this to show the bigger picture which is how soldiers are

4. What does Country Joe mean when he says “Well, come on mothers throughout the land…pack your boys off to Vietnam…Be the first one on your block to have your boy come home in a box?”

As opposed to communicating his outrage he tries to avoid panicking. This is either an indication of incredible resilience or utter shortcoming. There, on the other hand, is a moment when Joe demonstrates that his pride has been harmed, to be specific when he leaves the coin under his wife's cushion in the wake of laying down with her. This is a sudden turn in an identity that is apparently unequipped for harming someone else. Anyhow who can accuse the poor man for he has seen his entire world go into disrepair after the treachery of his loved one. The integrity of his character is completely shown in his pardoning toward the end of the story.

Two authors, Yusef Komunyakaa and Stephen Crane, created deep and moving stories about what the feelings are to be in a American war. Even though both stories are very different they both can also be related very easily. Yusef Komunyakaa wrote a poem called ‘Camouflaging the Chimera’ while Stephen Crane wrote a novel excerpt called ‘The Red Badge of Courage.’ One of the major differences are that TRBOC takes place in the American Civil war even though he was born 6 years after. While CTC takes place in the vietnam war. Going over the writing style, theme, and context figuring out the differences and similarities.

War is a horrible thing to Joe, and it is too late for him to go back and change the outcome.

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

A sequence of events leads up to Joe becoming almost completely isolated from the outside world. During his time in the isolated continent, Joe becomes addicted to narcotics; he escapes his pain and anguish by succumbing to detached and paralyzed state of mind. Throughout his journey in this secluded continent, he is faced with his hatred of the Germans and his desire to enact vengeance upon them for all that he has lost. When he meets a German geologist exploring the frozen tundra, he inadvertently kills him. Joe experiences ironic feelings of remorse after so many years spent obsessing over the destruction of the Germans. There was no gratification or fulfillment, for Joe, in the German man’s death. Joe felt repulsed and an abhorrence in himself for his

In this essay, I will discuss how Tim O’Brien’s works “The Things They Carried” and “If I Die in a Combat Zone” reveal the individual human stories that are lost in war. In “The Things They Carried” O’Brien reveals the war stories of Alpha Company and shows how human each soldier is. In “If I Die in a Combat Zone” O’Brien tells his story with clarity, little of the dreamlike quality of “Things They Carried” is in this earlier work, which uses more blunt language that doesn’t hold back. In “If I Die” O’Brien reveals his own personal journey through war and what he experienced. O’Brien’s works prove a point that men, humans fight wars, not ideas. Phil Klay’s novel “Redeployment” is another novel that attempts to humanize soldiers in war. “Redeployment” is an anthology series, each chapter attempts to let us in the head of a new character – set in Afghanistan or in the United States – that is struggling with the current troubles of war. With the help of Phil Klay’s novel I will show how O’Brien’s works illustrate and highlight each story that make a war.

Joe has spent his life making many decisions most of which appear to have been good decisions resulting in his family enjoying a comfortable life. The audience admires him for this. Unfortunately, late one night Joe made a hurried decision, which he believed he could get away with. The reasons for his decision comes to light near the end of the play, in Act 2, when he tells Chris why he made that decision, "I'm a business man, a man is in business; a hundred and twenty cracked, you're out of business, you got a process, the process don't work you're out of business; you don't know how to operate, your stuff is no good; they close you up, they tear up your contract what the hell's it to them? You lay forty years into a business and they knock you out in five minutes, what