Johnny Got His Gun Study Guide

Dalton Trumbo was born and grew up in Colorado. Like Joe, the protagonist of Trumbo’s anti-war novel Johnny Got His Gun, Trumbo also lost his father at an early age and moved to Los Angeles to work the night shift at a bakery. While going to college in Los Angeles, he wrote 88 short stories, six novels, and several movie reviews, all of which were rejected. While today Trumbo is perhaps most famous as the screenwriter for films like Roman Holiday and Spartacus, he began his career writing for magazines, later publishing his first novel, Eclipse, in 1935. Trumbo’s involvement with the American Communist Party got him placed on Hollywood’s “blacklist” of banned screenwriters after Trumbo refused to testify in front of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee. Trumbo continued to write screenplays without receiving official credit and eventually helped end the blacklist in the early 1960s. He died in Los Angeles in 1976. Trumbo’s life story received renewed attention after the release of the biopic Trumbo in 2015 and the release of blacklist-era Hollywood parody Hail, Caesar! in 2016.

Dalton Trumbo speculated that Johnny Got His Gun might have been the last novel about World War I to be written before World War II. World War I, known as the Great War at the time, started in 1914 and became the most destructive war in history up until that point, largely due to new technology that led to deadlier weaponry, including tanks, toxic gas, machine guns, and aircraft. The war pitted the Central Powers (including Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire) against the Allies (including France, the UK, Italy, Russia, and Japan), with the United States joining in 1917 on the side of the Allies. While a little over 100,000 American military personnel and civilians died in the war, the total number of deaths from all nations was about 40 million, meaning the war had an even more significant impact on Europe. The deaths from the war, combined with the deaths from the 1918 influenza pandemic, helped define the “Lost Generation,” people who came of age during World War I. Significantly, many historians credit the harsh conditions placed on Germany after the war with collapsing the German economy and setting the stage for Adolf Hitler to rise to power, eventually starting World War II. Trumbo’s novel thus anticipates how World War I would not be the “war to end all wars,” like some people predicted.

Johnny Got His Gun is an anti-war novel set during World War I. Perhaps the best-known books in that genre are Erich Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, both of which came out a few years before Johnny Got His Gun was first published. Both novels criticize the glorification of war and depict the apparent senselessness of the violence, with A Farewell to Arms in particular exploring some of the horrors that take place in a military hospital. Trumbo’s novel makes extensive use of a technique called free indirect discourse, where a character’s thoughts blend seamlessly with narration. Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice) and Goethe (Faust) were two pioneers of the technique, although it gained even greater popularity after appearing in the work of modernist writers like James Joyce (Ulysses) and Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway). In addition to having some stylistic similarities, Mrs. Dalloway also grapples with the horrors of World War I: One of the book’s characters, Septimus Smith, is a WWI veteran who suffers from shell shock (PTSD) and hallucinations before ultimately dying by suicide. Additionally, as one of the most well-known American Communists, Trumbo took philosophical inspiration from the works of the foundational communist writers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (The Communist Manifesto), particularly during the end of Johnny Got His Gun, where protagonist Joe imagines a revolution similar to Marx and Engels’s prediction that the “proletariat” (working class) would one day rise up against the “ruling class.”