Johnny Got His Gun

Food and eating are important motifs in Johnny Got His Gun, as they serve as frequent reminders of human connection and help to emphasize the divide between Joe’s pre- and post-war lives.

Joe’s wartime experiences and present state lead to experiences of alimentation that are divorced from normal human and social contexts, rendering the experience of nourishment clinical and even dehumanizing. While in the hospital, Joe recalls a soldier who had the top part of his stomach destroyed. To remedy this, the doctors “took the skin and meat from a dead man and they made a flap over the first guy’s stomach. They could lift the flap like a window and watch him digest his food” (87). In turning the soldier’s injury into a kind of exhibit of digestion, the doctors reduce food and eating to a mere physical process removed from its human context, while also turning the soldier into a scientific curiosity. The feeding tubes Joe and other soldiers have to use in the hospital also emphasize the extensive nature of their injuries: “there were wards where men ate through tubes and would eat through them [for] the rest of their lives” (87). In being deprived of something as simple as the ability to feed themselves, soldiers like Joe are once again faced with permanent transformations that impede their agency.

The clinical and dehumanizing experience of being force-fed through tubes forms a strong contrast to how the novel depicts food and eating elsewhere. For Joe, meals are often emblematic of peacetime and human sociability. Joe cherishes his memories of his mother cooking fresh bread rolls, as they remind him of home and peace: “steaming hot and you put butter inside them and it melted and then you put jam on them” (17). When Joe has reveries of dawn in his hometown, he imagines men waking up and discovering that “their wives had sausages and hot cakes and coffee for them” (143). In these memories and reveries, the food itself is nurturing and meaningful because it is made by a family member or spouse and eaten with loved ones in a social setting. Thus, Joe’s experience of tube-feeding in the hospital is especially impoverished and tragic, as it is a reminder of everything that he has irrevocably lost, both physically and socially.

Airplanes symbolize modernity and the wartime misuses of technology. Joe recalls how, as a child, he once met a pilot named Lincoln Beechy who visited his school. The school superintendent, Mr. Hargraves, declared in a speech that “the invention of the airplane was the greatest step forward man had made in a hundred years” (20) and that it was “ushering in a new era of peace and prosperity and mutual understanding” (21). Mr. Hargraves’ emphasis on “peace and prosperity and mutual understanding” stresses the peaceful potential of the new aerial technology, suggesting that the use of airplanes could bring greater opportunities for cross-cultural dialogue and cooperation between nations.

Joe’s later experiences in the First World War ironically subvert Mr. Hargraves’ vision of aerial technology bringing peace to the world. Instead, the airplane becomes a symbol and tool of war, leading to the bombardment of both military and civilian targets alike. Due to its demonstrated potential for destruction, the airplane is central to Joe’s vision of future wars at the novel’s end: “he had seen the airplanes flying in the sky he had seen the skies of the future filled with them black with them and now he saw the horror beneath” (248). At the novel’s close, the airplane epitomizes the distortion of what might be a beneficial technology for violent and inhumane ends.