Book Review 2

Johnny Got His Gun - Dalton Trumbo

This National Book Award winner is a very old book, written in 1938 and first published in 1939; and is yet very relevant today. In fact more so today because reading it brings the realization, that wars have been raging in this world ever so often since this book was written. And one wonders when and where Trumbo’s anti-war message got lost in this world. For people my generation especially, who have never really witnessed a pacifist movement, this book forces one to think, to question the need for any war, no matter what purpose.

Before I begin on a critique of the book, it is important to place its importance in history. Notice the year in which the book was written. It seems to be an output of the revulsion of war that spread through the world after the World War I. And it was published two days after the second World War began. It was an immediate success on its publication but suddenly died out after Pearl Harbor happened and the need for anti-war sentiment was dispensed with, in the contagious nationalism and righteousness that increased the United States’ aggressiveness in WW-II. It is not just a popular myth that those of us born after the two World Wars see this world differently from what people who lived in Dalton’s age must have. For them the first WW must have come as a shocking realization of the havoc that war could cause; of the reach and effect that a war could have, of the numbers it could kill, and kill so easily with the invention of modern warfare. And yet the extreme violence and brutality perpetrated by the Nazis, and the vehemence with which the Allied powers (and their supporters) felt the need to act, strongly justified the second WW and temporarily erased the logic of pacifism. Much later the book became popular again during the Vietnam anti-war sentiment that spread through the United States.

The book begins as a semi-dream and it takes quite a bit of time on the reader’s part to figure out whether it really is a dream or whether it is subconscious rambling or what. Written throughout in the voice of a second-person narrative; the entire book moves as conversations, memories and thoughts inside one person’s mind. Joe Bonham wakes up from some reverie to the ringing of a telephone somewhere and to the realization of pain. His thoughts are confused to the point where there is a conscious knowledge of again being in the recurring memory of the day he had heard about the death of his father, when he used to work in the bakery. The phone may not actually be ringing at all. And yet it is ringing in his mind and he cannot get it to stop nor can he for some reason get to it.

The first thing that Trumbo’s character realizes about his physical condition is that he is wrapped in bandage, every part of him. And soon after he realizes that he is deaf. The way Trumbo introduces Joe’s physical state to the reader in such little bits through Joe’s own realization is both clever and riveting. The narration of Joe’s thoughts, on his realization of being deaf; have two important achievements. The first is that Trumbo gets his first opportunity to express scorn for the war. The words “Where did they get that stuff about bombproof dugouts when a man in one of them could be hit so hard that the whole complicated business of his ears could be blown away leaving him deaf so deaf that he couldn’t hear his own heartbeat” and “So he’d never hear again. Well there were a hell of a lot of things he didn’t want to hear again. He never wanted to hear the biting little castanet sound of a machine gun or the high whistle of a .75 coming down fast or the slow thunder as it hit or the whine of airplane overhead or the yells of a guy trying to explain to somebody that he’s got a bullet in his belly and that his breakfast is coming out through the front of him and why won’t somebody stop going forward and give him a hand only nobody can hear him they’re so scared themselves” are very powerful and full of sarcasm against war. The second achievement is that his deafness is the first bit to the piecemeal construction of Joe’s medical state, and at this point in the book it is the only known condition, to which Joe’s reaction conveys a sense of tragedy combined with gratitude. His thoughts are narrated as “What about the rest of the guys? Maybe they didn’t come out so lucky. … It isn’t anything to kick up your heels and dance about but it might be worse. Only when you’re deaf you’re lonesome. You’re godforsaken.” Both the gratitude that Joe feels at being only deaf (his realization so far) and the tragedy he feels he has been a victim to, are set by Trumbo in contrasting anticipation for what he will actually spring upon his audience. And when that unravels slowly, the reader tends to remember these thoughts of Joe when he was only deaf. The gratitude turns to anger and the tragedy is ever so heightened.

A strange suspense runs throughout the book, as if Trumbo wants to keep the reader guessing about what could come next. Initially this is more of an expectation by the reader, eager to form the skeleton of the story that the author has in mind. Once this is done and the horror of the tragedy to which Joe has been victim has been communicated to the reader, the suspense takes on a hopeless view for a while. The realization sinks in that Joe is a living thing only in the technical sense but there’s nothing left to his life that could keep the story going. A human condition so extreme was beyond imagination because one does not normally imagine the level of injury that Joe has been through to be possible without causing death. Trumbo suddenly then twists the narrative with the fact that Joe has an intelligent thinking mind that can do a lot even though it has almost lost its body. An excitement grips Joe and along with him grips the reader as well. Then the suspense takes a more urgent note as the reader waits with bated breath for Joe to overcome his tragedy and to move on in some way, a hope that the reader thought was incapable of existing in the slightest.

There is a blurring of lines between dreams, memories, sleep and wakefulness carried along with the book as it advances. In fact this is probably the one quality of the narration that transports the reader into the bodily world of Joe Bonham. It is because of this that one experiences the possible state of being alive with a physical existence that falls short of being called a human body. Trumbo effectively uses this to involve the reader and to arouse in her the vehemence and the anger that he felt against war.

Joe’s vivid memories of his life before the war tells one of a normal happy childhood with parents in love with each other, his times spent with his father, and normal troubles of a young adolescence. There is a hint in the story of Joe’s family as never having enough money, and yet even this difficulty is to an extent washed down with the description of all that home-made/grown healthy food. Trumbo couldn’t have conjured up a more perfect contrast to Joe’s present state of being, to enhance the horror and to leave not a trace of doubt in favor of the idea of war and martyrdom for some larger ideology. More than once in the book, Trumbo’s disgust for ideological war shows through; in Joe’s conversations with himself, on his wasted life for someone else’s cause: “Maybe there are more things wrong with you than you suspect Joe. Oh why the hell did you get into this mess anyhow? Because it wasn’t your fight Joe. You never really knew what the fight was all about.” At one more point in the book Joe is talking to himself about liberty, democracy, honor, native-land, and all those ideas that they make people fight for and his simple sensible questions like “What kind of democracy? And whose?” and “Tell us how much better a decent dead man feels than an indecent live one?” send Trumbo’s anti-war message across very effectively.

Then there is the memory of Joe’s girl, the tenderness and freshness of finding love at an early age. It seems like a precious love, one that must be treasured. And yet again Trumbo is very clever in his narration because he does not let the two young people be with each other for too long. They seemed to have just found each other when war takes him away, and Joe’s tragedy erases every possibility of them ever getting back together. Trumbo builds up the scorn and anger against war with all these details. It becomes criminal for any war to destroy a life such as Joe Bonham’s and reduce it to its present state. And in his narration, he keeps Joe going on with the memory of Kareen. It’s the strength and consistency of love against the destruction of war.

I don’t know if there has ever really been a medical case like that of Joe described in this book. I remember the shock I felt when finally Joe realizes how very little is left of his body. Even if a person in such a state got rid of all pain, one would think there was nothing left in life for him. In fact, the first thought that probably came to my mind was that this was a perfect case for euthanasia. Death is the first hope even for Joe Bonham, when the enormity of his tragedy registers with him. This is what he thinks: “Oh no. No no no. He couldn’t live like this because he would go crazy. But he couldn’t die because he couldn’t kill himself. If he could only breathe he could die. That was funny but it was true. He could hold his breath and kill himself. That was the only way left. Except that he wasn’t breathing. His lungs were pumping air but he couldn’t stop them from doing it. He couldn’t live and he couldn’t die.” The entire thing seemed almost fantastic and unreal to me, and yet not once did I doubt the convincing story.

There is one bit in the story that was to me the most horrifying and nerve-wrenching part. This is when Joe feels a rat chewing on him and there is nothing he can do to get it off him or to call for help. Later he thinks it may have been a dream and because his being awake and sleeping is so much a matter of what he believes he is doing, there is no way to verify the reality of the incident. At this point I almost lost my head along with Joe, and was really frightened that whether dream or not, this could recur; and if it did that would drive him insane. Simply reading about it and envisioning it was like some outrageous nightmare come alive. Thankfully, Trumbo does not do a repeat of it. He does use the rat to remind Joe of a slightly gross war incident when they stumble upon a dead Prussian captain in an abandoned trench. The position in which the body is found suggested that the Prussian had been heading into the dugout exactly when he was shot. He had one leg up in the air and the body was swollen, being dead, although the mustache was still waxed. And they find sitting on his neck a fat rat, chewing away at his face. One yell by someone sets them all at the rat and they don’t stop till they have beaten it to pulp. Trumbo’s words right at this moment make mechanical soldiers out of the men who had for a moment forgotten themselves : “Then they were all still for a second. They felt kind of foolish. They left the dugout and went on with the war.”

There is another war memory of Joe’s which has a certain black humor to it. It’s the narrative of the lone Bavarian who had probably wondered beyond what he had intended to, is shot at, and remains dead and ignored caught on a wire till he attracts orders of burial by his strong decay stink. And then is blown back from his grave by a mine to land on the wire again to decay further. This earned him the nickname of Lazarus. I kept wondering if Trumbo had been in some war or not, because one would think only a real experience would enable him to describe decaying human bodies with such ease of narration. But apparently Trumbo hadn’t been part of any war. In fact Wikipedia tells me that Johnny Got His Gun was inspired by an article Trumbo had read about a Canadian soldier who had lost all his limbs in WW-I and was visited in hospital by the Prince of Wales. This inspiration is directly depicted in one scene in the book when Joe gets some visitors and he realizes that they have come to honor him with a medal. His anger knows no bounds at this outrage and he expresses it in the only way that he can by rolling from shoulder to shoulder and puffing out air and in this hysteria he manages to create his first grunting sound vibrations.

Joe Bonham in the book is an intelligent person. He is curious about what state he is in, and he answers his questions himself. He reasons with himself and lists for himself everything in life that he will never again know, feel or experience. The most fascinating bit in the book is his fight to control his life again in whatever manner is possible. In fact, Trumbo separates this part of the book by calling it ‘Book 2: The Living’ as compared with the first half which is ‘Book 1: The Dead’. Joe begins with tracking time, at first counting to himself so he can keep an account of time and later more intelligently by sensing the sunrise and keeping a check on his perception of time with the visits of the nurse and his schedule of change of clothes and linen. It is amazing to read about such a brave and intelligent attitude. And then the whole idea of being able to communicate despite being just a chunk of flesh was superb. When the nurse writes ‘Merry Christmas’ on his chest, as a reader one feels like celebrating a fresh new birth of his contact with the world. Despite being a depressing story Trumbo manages to blend so much life and hope into it; although he does end the book again at a very morbid note. And the last Morse code speech that Joe communicates across with his demand to have him shown all over the world so people know what war can do, is the strongest anti-war speech I have seen or heard.

It’s a brilliantly and passionately written book. There was also a movie based on it and it did make some substantial changes even though Trumbo apparently wrote the screenplay and directed the movie too. In the movie, when finally Joe manages to communicate with the Morse code, what he asks is to be killed. I personally preferred how the book treated the story, made it less dramatic and yet more unexpected and finished off at an unknown point where Joe probably lives on, even though all hope and all life within him is killed with a refusal by the people around him to acknowledge his amazing success at communication and to set him free, and most importantly in his own words because they did not “want him”.