Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Johnny Got His Gun, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Horrors of War
The Value of Life
Elites vs. Common People
Time and Memory
Summary
Analysis
At a large bakery in Los Angeles, on a rainy December just before Christmas, Joe seems to have a massive hangover and is annoyed to hear a phone ringing loudly. It’s far away, so he heads over to the night shipping room to find it. He answers the phone and hears from his mother that his father has died. He goes to his foreman, Jody Simmons, and tells him the news. His foreman lets him punch out and take a truck home.
The book starts with a ringing phone, and more phones appear throughout the novel, emphasizing the importance of communication in the story. The rain and Joe’s hangover give the scene in which Joe learns of his father’s death an appropriately dreary mood. All is not as it seems, however, and the end of the first chapter will put these early events into a new perspective.
Themes
Joe makes it back to his parents’ two-story house, where his father lies dead in the living room with a sheet over his face. His father had been sick for a while. His mother and his two younger sisters are there too; the younger sister sleeps while the older sister cries.
This passage demonstrates some dark humor (with Joe’s father dead in the “living” room). Death comes right into Joe’s house, where he and the rest of his family can’t avoid it, dramatizing how death is inevitable.
Themes
Two men knock at the door and come in to take care of the body. Joe sees the face of his father, who is only 51, and thinks that he feels older than his father. He thinks about how the world has been getting harder and tougher, and so maybe it’s not so bad that his father has left it. His mother says that the corpse isn’t really his father anymore, even if it looks like him. Joe pats her shoulder and puts his arm around her to comfort her.
The reference to Joe feeling older than his father hints at Joe’s experiences as a soldier in World War I (an experience his father wouldn’t have had), but at this point the chronology of the story is still unclear. Joe’s mother’s comment that Joe’s father isn’t inside his body anymore suggests that she believes a person’s essence lies in their intangible soul, not their physical body. The question of what makes a person’s essence—including how a person’s body affects their sense of self—is central to the novel.
Themes
Just when Joe thinks it’s all over, the phone starts ringing again. He loses sense of reality and thinks at first that maybe he has a terrible hangover and is just remembering his father’s death as part of a bad dream. He seems to keep getting the same phone call about his father’s death again and again. He realizes he might be sick in a hospital and that the ether is wearing off. The telephone ringing, which announces the death of his father, seems to be part of the dream. Joe hears it again and gets scared.
Joe struggles to tell the difference between memory, dreams, and reality throughout much of the novel. Joe’s inability to keep events straight in his head often leaves him feeling powerless, and the repetition of the telephone in this section illustrates how Joe is trapped in a cycle that he can’t control.
Themes
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Joe’s whole body convulses with pain. His heart pounds, and he realizes when he can’t hear his pulse in his ears that he’s deaf. He realizes that maybe the “bombproof” dugout that he was in (as a soldier in World War I) wasn’t so bombproof after all—and that he got hit. He wonders what happened to the other men who were with him. Joe considers that while he might never hear again, at least he won’t hear the sounds of machine guns or screaming ever again. He collects his thoughts and realizes that he is alive in a hospital, hallucinating things like the ringing telephone.
Although the book explores the grim nature of war, it sometimes uses dark humor. For example, in this section, it’s ironic that Joe got hit with an artillery shell in a dugout that was specifically called “bombproof.” Furthermore, Joe’s ability to see the bright side of his situation—that at least he’ll never have to hear the awful sounds of war ever again—also demonstrates a dark sense of humor. The ringing telephone seems to connect to “ringing” ears, a common side effect of being caught in a big explosion like the artillery shell blast that injured Joe, which can lead to deafness like Joe’s.
Themes
Joe thinks back on his childhood and how his mother and father always seemed happy. He remembers them talking about courting each other over the telephone on a party line; anyone else in his mother’s small Colorado town could pick up the line and interrupt. His mother would play piano over the phone for his father, and sometimes other people on the line would make requests about what to play next. Joe hears a distant piano keeping time with the ringing phone and wants to be dead like his father.
While the telephone was a grim symbol of death earlier in the chapter, this passage portrays the telephone in a more positive light, as a symbol of human connection and love. Joe’s memories of stories from before the war are idyllic, depicting a happy world where people communicate with each other. By losing his sense of hearing, Joe loses the ability to connect with other humans that the telephone represents.
Themes
