Johnny Got His Gun Analysis

One character is obviously the comic relief, another the beloved hero. The rest, valiant men fighting for their country, their lives, their freedom. The scene ends and the curtain rises, all of the pseudo soldiers take a bow and go home to their normal lives, far from the hands of death that grasp at the men forgotten in Vietnam, the real soldiers. They, who saw the hardships of war as more than just a script, beyond the glamorized versions that are seen by the American eyes. They saw the death and the tragedy, slowly becoming worn down into less of a human and more of a desensitized killing machine because that 's what war does. It permanently scars the soldiers, tearing away the feeling of loss and inappropriately replacing it with comedy, showing that war is destructive, stealing away an ounce of humanity with each bullet. As seen in The Things They Carried, written by Tim O 'Brien, the Vietnam War destroyed the minds of soldiers, causing them to lose their human emotions in an unglamorous setting, devaluing death as they lose their ability to appropriately handle situations.

In order to illustrate the devastating affects of war, Kurt Vonnegut afflicted Billy Pilgrim with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which caused him to become “unstuck in time” in the novel. Billy Pilgrim illustrates many symptoms of PTSD throughout the story. Vonnegut uses these Slaughterhouse Five negative examples to illustrate the horrible and devastating examples of war. The examples from the book are parallel to real life experiences of war veterans, including Vonnegut’s, and culminate in a very effective anti-war novel.

There are two types of people that fight in wars; those who consider their patriotic duty an honor and those who entered the war by force. In 1990, twenty years after returning from the Vietnam War, Tim O’Brien published The Things They Carried, a disturbing and remorseful collection of short stories that gives detailed, yet fictional, accounts of the horrific events that occurred during the war. Later in 2012, after his tour of duty, Chris Kyle released American Sniper, a humble and passionate memoir that describes what Kyle had to face during his tour. While The Things They Carried utilizes symbolism and similes to inform the reader about the horrors of war, American Sniper uses flashbacks and imagery to demonstrate that some people “come alive” during the 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

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.

Johnny Tremain,” by Esther Forbes is a book about a boy that lived before and during the Revolutionary War. In this book, Johnny Tremain experienced many things as a boy, apprentice, a silversmith, a messenger, and a revolutionary. While Johnny was getting older and time past by, Johnny experienced love, changing, and betrayal in many ways. Johnny changes during the story, as well as experience love and betrayal right in front of him. Although Johnny went through many hardships, he was still able to overcome the obstacles that came to him. After reading “Johnny Tremain,” Johnny never gave up, and people should never give up just because there is a barrier ahead of us. “Johnny Tremain” has many historical figures that allow the reader to know

In a different fashion, Charlie is also similarly thrusted upon the knowledge that his way of life has been negatively affected by the war. While working on the farm like any other day, the neighbors slave, Gabriel, who was spending time with his son Boy, came with inauspicious news that Boy had been taken by Union soldiers. Here Charlie learns that his son who meant so much to him because he was born the day his wife died, has been taken which puts an immediate stop to his thinking that everything is okay. This further promits him, like Joe, to go and search for Boy who represents the past and normal life that has been taken away by war. Even though Joe and Charlie find out what the war has taken from them in unmistakably different ways, they both begin searching for a part of their previous life that has been forcibly taken away from them because of war.

In “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien, the man is drafted into the Vietnam War where he faces many obstacles mentally and physically. The characters are heavily impacted by the war’s power and try to find ways within themselves to escape its brutality. The author uses language and character’s reactions to their inner conflicts to illustrate the mental stresses that arise in war.

Many people go into things blind without any thought process behind their actions which will often lead to the worst consequences. Many novels and movies reveal this message clearly. In the novel Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo, Joe, a young soldier drafted into the war, suffered extreme injures both mentally and physically after battle due to not fully knowing what to expect going into war. Likewise, in Shenandoah, a 1965 Civil War movie, Boy, the youngest in the Anderson family, mistakenly gets forced into the line of battle and is faced with the truth behind the whole war at a very young age and faces several losses from his journey. Despite the fact that Joe and Boy both suffered different consequences, they

Plato, an ancient Greek philosopher, maintained the theory that “only the dead have seen the end of war.” Plato, who lived from 427 BCE to 347 BCE, experienced a lifetime filled with war and expanding empires. Although Plato remained a philosopher, rather than a soldier, he chose to acknowledge the loss and destruction following war. Plato’s theory of “only the dead have seen the end of war,” means one will see the end of war only in death because if one may survive war, one will never be able to tell when the next shall begin. Both Dalton Trumbo's novel Johnny Got His Gun and Universal's film Shenandoah tell the story of two seemingly different characters, Joe Bonham and Charlie Anderson, who in a like manner, undergo loss and

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

Growing up, many young boys idolized the war heroes in movies such as Saving Private Ryan and American Sniper. However, the glorified heroism that is depicted in these films is far from the reality that is war. A more realistic rendition of war is seen in Tim O’Brien’s short story, The Things They Carried. Throughout the story, O’Brien uses metafictional characters to portray the physical and emotional burdens carried by American soldiers who were forced to conform to societal expectations upon being drafted for the Vietnam War. The literary elements O’Brien uses throughout the story to convey this theme are symbolism, imagery, tone, and inner conflict of the protagonist.

Although Charlie had tried his hardest to keep his family safe and out of the war, he still suffered consequences from the war. It was very clear that Charlie did not think he and his family should get involve in the fighting, not because he opposed fighting, but because Charlie felt like the cause of the war was something that was not worth fighting for. Charlies experience differs from the experience of Joe from “Johnny Got His Gun” because of who they experience loss from. In “Johnny Got His Gun” Joe suffers his injuries from a shell that had exploded near him. Although Joe was drafted into the war he suffered his consequences from being directly involved in the fighting.

Through many and many war stories, the story tends to focus on the males and their involvement and understanding of war. The women’s story are left out or left to a minor plot, leaving the audience to decipher the women’s fate. In the World War 1 novel Johnny Got His Gun, by Dalton Trumbo follows Joe, a young injured soldier’s journey through his life stuck in the hospital. In the Civil War film Shenandoah, directed by Andrew V. McLaglen, the story follows an American family and their sacrifices and consequences regarding the war. The protagonists are both male characters and their experience with the war, but both include important female characters and how they are affected as well.