Blog on the Lillypad
Tuesday, February 03, 2004
 | Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo
Once again, as part of my reading club experience, I have been assigned to read a book for my group's monthly discussion. The latest picks is Johnny Got His Gun. This book chronicles the intermittent dreams and growing consciousness of a young man who wakes up in an army hospital and gradually becomes conscious enough to realize that he's been ripped apart by a bomb: a quadripelegic who has also lost his sight and hearing. The weight of the story is his recollections of his very idyllic life before he went to war. |
A popular review of this book remarks that it was kept obscure for several years because it was introduced just as the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939. Obviously, in an era when the Poles had to fight to protect themselves from the open pillaging of their country (which the Nazis carried out in short order), this book's flaws would become too apparent. Just as the sheer extent of the main character's wounds are unlikely, his incredibly tranquil and fulfilling life before the war are unlikely.
Like any argument that rests upon a rare extremity of evidence, JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN fails in its logic. It is merely propaganda, because the argument rests entirely on one person in one extreme situation.
As tragic as the main character is, the book starts out flawed because it shows only one perspective. In 1939, when the Nazis actually were burning down synagogues, raping women, and deporting Polish Jews to Buchenwald and Treblinka, this book could not sell well because the opposite side of the question of the necessity of war had become too urgent. Men and women who did not go to war were reduced to smoking hulks of flesh simply because they were Jewish or epileptic or dissidents. So Trumbo's argument falls flat.
I think the story is tedious, predictable, skewed, and too overtly propagandistic. If you want a great anti-war novel, I would urge you to read the classic, RED BADGE OF COURAGE. It's shorter, more terse, has more impact, takes a wider scope, and has better literary quality.
Another flaw is that a lot of Trumbo's argument is not really against WAR, but is against WARTIME PROPAGANDA. He swaps the two concepts and really batters the straw man of propaganda without ever discussing war itself. At the end of the book, when even the main character seems to be threatening war to get what he wants, the reader still has a question unanswered: Is it ever right for a person to pick up a gun and fire at an advancing aggressor? Becuase that's what war is. And that question is never answered.
If you argue against the parades and the high talk of dying for honor or for liberty, or handsome uniforms, or ribbons, you are back to propaganda. That's really what Trumbo rails against in his book.
But when you talk about the Nazis battering at the gate and having the opportunity to pick up a gun and drive them off, then you're talking about war. Trumbo fails to discuss this idea with any depth.
I don't know why this book is considered a classic. If he'd taken half the length to say what it says, it would have said just as much with perhaps more power. But because he over-hammers his point, the reader swims in overt emotional manipulation. And the book begns to lose its effectiveness well before the end.
There are reasons to reject some wars and refuse to fight. But this book never gets to those reasons. At best, it shows us that it is really stupid to listen to wartime propaganda and sign up to fight just because everybody else is doing it. Granted, that much is true. So I would call it an anti-propaganda book. But did you really need an entire book to tell you not to fall for propaganda?
