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 6-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book 1, Chapter 6 Summary
Joe thinks about his time working in the industrial bakery in Los Angeles. Due to the amount of work to do, the bakery often took on men from the homeless shelter to help on Friday nights. Joe recalls how “the guys from the Mission came stinking of disinfectant and looking very bedraggled and embarrassed” (67). However, one night a handsome Porto Rican came from the Mission to work for them. He claimed that a rich girl from New York was in love with him and that he was going to work in the movie industry. Nobody in the bakery believed this was possible, but one day Jose revealed that he had got a job in a studio. The only problem, as Jose explained, was how to quit his existing job at the bakery without being disrespectful to their boss, Mr Simmons, whom he believed he owed so much. The men therefore tried to devise various ways that Jose could get fired without seeming ungrateful to Simmons. Jose achieved this in the end by engineering an accident in which he seemed to knock over a huge row of pies.
Book 1, Chapter 7 Summary
Joe takes stock of his injuries and thinks about why, given their extremity, he did not die. He reasons that the injuries to his arms and legs may have been minor at first but perhaps later became infected, leading to multiple amputations. Thinking more clearly, Joe feels that a cord has been tied around his forehead and realizes that a mask has been put over his face. He assumes the mask is so that the nurse “wouldn’t vomit at the sight of her patient” (90). Joe tries to turn over in his bed, hoping he will either suffocate or cause himself a fatal injury with one of the tubes he is attached to, in order to die by suicide. However, Joe discovers he is unable to turn himself over. He then thinks about another injury on the side of his body, a hole which will not heal up. He imagines that a rat comes crawling over him and starts biting at this wound. Joe is terrified, as he now believes the rat will now come back every night to torment him.
Book 1, Chapter 8 Summary
Joe wakes up in bed to find that a nurse is washing his body and dressing the wound at his side. He is relieved, since he isn’t “alone any longer” (97) and now understands that his belief that a rat had crawled onto him was only a dream. However, he still worries that the dream might recur. He tries to think of ways to wake himself up if he has that dream again. He reasons that he cannot scream to wake himself up because he has no mouth and cannot hear. Nor can he try and open his eyes since he has no eyes. Instead, Joe focuses on thinking, as he believes that when he is concentrating he cannot be in the passive state of sleep.
Book 1, Chapter 9 Summary
Joe remembers going on a camping trip with his father in the summer when he was fifteen. He “knew that it was the end of something” (105) because previously he had always camped and gone fishing with just his father, but on this occasion, Joe’s best friend, Bill Harper, joined them the following day. Furthermore, Joe ended up going fishing with Bill rather than his dad. After this trip, Joe would continue going camping with only his friends and his father would go with other men.
During the trip, Joe borrows his father’s fishing rod—one of his father’s prized possessions—but ends up losing it in the water. His father forgives him for the loss. Joe reflects on how his father was considered a “failure” (109) because he did not have enough money to buy another rod like that one, despite his father being an excellent gardener and providing ample, delicious food for his family from what he grew on two small plots of land.
Book 1, Chapter 10 Summary
Joe reflects on the war and why he had to go and fight in it. He reasons that in most other circumstances in life, when someone asks a person to do something or give something up, the other person can ask, “what’s in it for me” (113) and potentially refuse. However, the circumstances of a war are different: a person cannot ask how it benefits themselves to go fight, or what guarantees can be made as to potential benefits, even though there is a risk of death and mutilation. Joe then considers the justifications that are usually given for war and for the First World War in particular, such as “liberty,” “decency,” or one’s “native land” (117). Joe concludes that such claims are ultimately empty rhetoric, as their substance and meaning are never clarified. He also concludes that such supposedly noble ideals can never be worth more than the value of a life.
Book 1, Chapters 6-10 Analysis
As Joe recovers and regains some degree of lucidity, he starts to realize the full horror of his situation. Joe’s injuries have left him totally unable to defend or care for himself—he has become like a “baby in its mother’s body” (83) and is now “completely helpless” (83). Joe recognizes that “if he should feel an insect crawling over the stump of body that remained he could not move one finger to destroy it” (84), which stresses his now-total dependence upon others. Joe responds to his state of dependency by trying to die by suicide: he tries rocking his back and thighs on his bed to turn over, hoping to potentially kill himself by breaking the tubes attached to his body for breathing. Joe’s attempt at ending his life furthers the theme of The Dehumanization of the Soldier’s Mind and Body as it speaks to both the depths of his suffering, and his horror at the thought of losing his personal agency.
Joe’s dream about the rat gnawing his wound and his awareness that “there wasn’t anything he could do to scare it [away]” (95) also represent Joe’s fear that he has become both absolutely infantilized and corpse-like. He fears that he is, like the dead officer he once saw in a trench, vulnerable, passive, and no longer human. However, something redemptory comes out of this low point for Joe. He realizes that the rat is just a dream; to ensure that he is able to distinguish it as such and “wake” from it in future, Joe commits to concentrating exclusively on thinking. In developing tactics to avoid falling prey to these nightmares, Joe makes an effort to regain his humanity and adulthood by focusing on the one form of agency left open to him: “he had a mind left by god and that was all. It was the only thing he could use so he must use it every minute he was awake” (102). In embracing the powers of his mind, Joe begins to reassert some degree of control over his situation.
Significantly, Joe’s commitment to thinking leads him to reflect on The Centrality of Control and Propaganda in War, as he questions the justifications given for the First World War. Central to these justifications is “liberty,” an ideal to which Joe responds with skepticism, arguing, “what kind of liberty were they fighting for anyway? How much liberty and whose idea of liberty?” (114). Joe rejects abstract conceptions of liberty in favor of more concrete ideas about freedom, such as “the liberty to walk and see and hear and talk and eat and sleep with [his] girl” (115). In focusing upon simple activities such as having physical freedom—the freedom “to walk and see and hear and talk and eat”—Joe highlights both the simple joys of living in peace and draws attention to the basic activities that are now limited or impossible for him due to his injuries. In defining liberty as the freedom to “sleep with [his] girl,” Joe also reveals again his deep desire for human connection. In conceiving of "liberty" as the enjoyment of a peaceful, ordinary life in place of an abstract political or military ideal, Joe rejects the rhetorical tactics of war propaganda, creating a more humanistic ideal of freedom for himself instead.
Similarly, Joe also questions whether “liberty,” “democracy”, “honor” or the other values cited in justification of the war could ever be worth the sacrifice of a life. To determine this, he decides that one would have to ask those who died, while recognizing that this is impossible since “the dead can’t talk” (119). Nevertheless, Joe conceives of himself as someone who has figuratively died, in terms of losing all quality of life and his senses. However, through his consciousness and power of thought, he can speak for the dead. Joe’s reassertion of his agency through thought and reflection gives his condition a redemptory purpose—and a new imperative to try and communicate to escape his condition of total entombment.
