42 pages • 1 hour read
Dalton TrumboJohnny Got His Gun
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1939A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Book 1, Chapters 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book 1, Chapter 1 Summary
Joe Bonham, the protagonist of the novel, is working at a bakery in Los Angeles when he hears a phone ringing. Going to answer it, he hears someone saying that his father has just died, and Joe returns home. He sees his mother and his two younger sisters there, who are thirteen and seven years old. He looks at the face of his deceased father, who died after being severely ill. However, when he keeps hearing the phone ringing, he realizes that this is a memory. Joe is then engulfed by a sudden rush of pain and becomes aware of having bandages all over his skin. Joe becomes aware that he is actually in hospital, badly wounded. Joe has been serving as a soldier in World War I and now recalls how he was hit by an exploding German shell while in his trench. Feeling his heart pounding but unable to hear the pulse in his ears, Joe discovers that he is deaf. This leads him to another memory about his father and mother. While they were courting, his mother used to play the piano over the telephone to Joe’s father.
Book 1, Chapter 2 Summary
Joe thinks about his mother and the food she used to make in Shale City, Colorado, where he grew up. He says that “nobody anywhere in the world had anything more delicious to eat” (17) and recalls his mother’s freshly baked bread rolls. There was also a hamburger man, and on Saturday nights after being given money to buy the burgers, Joe would run home with them under his shirt to keep them warm for his parents. In Shale City in the fall, it would snow, and it was beautiful. One day when Joe was still young, Lincoln Beechy, one of America’s first pilots, came to visit Shale City in his plane. The superintendent of schools had declared after watching Beechy do a loop the loop that “the airplane was the greatest step forward man had made in a hundred years” (20). This was because, he claimed, it would shorten the distance between places and thus bring people of different cultures together.
Book 1, Chapter 3 Summary
Joe has the feeling of “rising and sinking” (26) and of being continually on the verge of drowning. He reasons that he has been close to death for potentially weeks and months and that doctors are working on his injured body. Unable to feel his arms, Joe discovers that they have been amputated and wonders how he is going to work without them. He also thinks about whether the ring that he used to wear is now lost. The ring was given to him by his sweetheart in Los Angeles, Kareen. This leads Joe to recall his last night with Kareen. Her father had let Joe and Kareen sleep in the same bed together for the first time because Joe was being sent off to fight in France the following morning. Joe remembers Kareen pleading with him not to go, and the cheering crowds at the station where he had to catch the train with the other soldiers.
Book 1, Chapter 4 Summary
Joe has flashbacks to working on a “section gang job” (45) as a teenager with his friend Howie. They were doing summer maintenance work on a railway in the Uintah desert in Utah. The work was backbreaking and the heat intense, and Joe almost fainted several times. They had gone there to escape Shale City because their girlfriends at the time, Diane and Onie, had cheated on them with Glen Hogan, another local teenager. When Howie gets a message from his girlfriend, Onie, apologizing to him after Glenn chooses Diane over her, they decide to leave the job and head home. After his return, Joe walks by Diane’s house. He does not plan to call on her though because he is still dirty from work. From the street opposite her house, he then sees Diane kissing his best friend, Bill Harper. This betrayal “seemed like dying” (55) to Joe, as his relationship with Bill was now irreparably damaged.
Book 1, Chapter 5 Summary
Joe’s thoughts become confused, and he feels again like he is drowning “in the dark bottom of the river while above him maybe only six or eight feet there was sunlight and willows” (59). He is in intense pain but consoles himself with the idea that he might be able to get hooks for arms and learn to lip-read. However, he feels that he is not lying level and that the lower half of him is very light. It then dawns on Joe that this weightless feeling is because his legs have been amputated. He tries to scream from terror, only to discover that he has no mouth either. Joe tries to work out how much is left of his face by using his remaining facial sensations to trace an imaginary circle of the hole in his head. He discovers that the hole goes too high to contain eyes and that he is blind. In a state of despair, Joe wishes that he could die.
Book 1, Chapters 1-5 Analysis
The opening scenes set in Joe’s past represent memories of important events in his life. Close to death and not fully conscious, Joe initially struggles to differentiate past from present. He recalls the phone call informing him of his father’s death. He also remembers his last night with a woman he loved, Kareen, before going to war. These scenes serve as a way of fleshing out Joe’s character and provide emotional context for his life, emphasizing The Importance of Human Connection and the significance of the personal relationships he had before the war.
Joe’s reveries also serve another significant function: They often center upon sensations of entrapment and helplessness, which contrast with his previous independent life. During his memory of his father’s body being taken away, Joe continues to hear the phone ring but is unable to silence it: “he felt as if he were tied down and couldn’t answer it” (9, emphasis added). Shortly afterwards, he recalls a dream he had as a child where his bed covers turned to lava and “he was entombed while yet alive,” (10, emphasis added) fearing that he “would lie there dying forever” (10). Trumbo introduces the theme of The Dehumanization of the Soldier’s Mind and Body by crafting Joe’s memories to mirror the most nightmarish aspects of his current predicament. Joe has been mentally and physically stripped of the qualities associated with personhood. His dire physical injuries have rendered him limbless, deaf, and mute, as though he were “entombed” in his own consciousness, as in the lava dream, while his inability to communicate with others in spite of his desire to do so is symbolized in the reverie of the unanswerable telephone.
Joe’s vivid recollections and imaginings also reflect the extreme exhaustion and pain he is undergoing in the present by melding it with a past moment of physical suffering. His dreams about water and drowning reflect his body’s struggle to stay alive as the doctors attempt to treat him: “he’d been rising and sinking for days weeks months [. . .] as he came to the surface each time he fainted into reality” (26). Likewise, Joe’s memory of working in the desert with Howie, in which Joe “seemed to be burning up inside and out” (41), mirrors the physical discomfort he now faces in the hospital. While Joe gradually gains awareness that doctors are doing things to his body, he is still unable to see or communicate with them, rendering what is happening to him a mystery. Thus, Joe’s memories and reveries symbolically illustrate his current medical crisis while also bringing dynamism to the story, creating scenes of tension and emotional pathos through Joe’s varying mental states while his body remains immobile and the outside world is inaccessible.
