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
Joe loses all track of time—he forgets about everything except tapping. He taps all day and dreams of tapping all night. The old day nurse tries to comfort him but can’t seem to fathom that he might still have some intelligence in him and be tapping deliberately. One day, the nurse begins to touch him differently. Her hands go to “the far parts of his body.” While Joe’s body gets excited, he feels that it’s a “false passion” and that the nurse mostly just pities him. Nevertheless, he tries to find the same rhythm as her and suddenly feels his blood pumping.
Joe’s failure to communicate with the nurse frustrates him so much that it causes him to lose some of the progress he made by creating a calendar. In this passage, Joe finds himself in an unusual situation where the nurse seems to be masturbating him, possibly as a result of misinterpreting his tapping. Once again, Joe feels at odds with his body as he feels the physical effects of “passion” but resents his feelings because he knows the nurse doesn’t really understand him.
Themes
Joe thinks back to the girls he used to know. Many of the guys in Shale City had their first sexual experience with a girl named Ruby, but by the time they reached high school, some of them feel ashamed about the things they did with her. They blame her for those feelings of shame and make fun of her. One day, Ruby disappears from town.
Joe’s experiences with Ruby reveal a conflicted view of sex, where it is intriguing and exciting but also a source of shame. With the benefit of hindsight, Joe seems to realize that perhaps it wasn’t fair to blame Ruby for his own feelings of shame.
Themes
Joe recalls another time when he was 17 or 18. In Joe’s flashback, he and Bill Harper decide to visit a mysterious house that belongs to a woman named Stumpy Telsa. Older men in town often visit this house. Although Stumpy threw them out one time when they tried to investigate the house when they were younger, this time she lets them stay and tells her Black kitchen worker to make them sandwiches. Joe and Bill have heard rumors of naked women wandering around inside the house, but when two women come down the stairs, they’re fully dressed in nice clothes.
Stumpy Telsa runs some sort of brothel. She kicks out Joe and Bill Harper when they’re young but allows them to stay when she thinks they’re old enough to know (or learn) what sex is. Joe and Bill are surprised to see that the women at Stumpy Telsa’s place wear nice clothes, which contrasts with their preconceived idea that sex is a shameful, disreputable act (a belief that the previous passage about Ruby hinted at).
Themes
Joe and Bill Harper talk with the women for half an hour before Stumpy Telsa sends Joe and Bill away. The women who likes Joe better is named Laurette. Joe comes back to see her a couple times a month, always before 9:00 p.m. He knows she’s a sex worker but can’t bring himself to have sex with her because the thought makes him feel dirty.
Despite their curiosity about Stumpy Telsa’s brothel, both Joe and Bill still have some of their boyhood innocence. Joe isn’t totally naïve about what Laurette does for a living, but he nevertheless still struggles with his deeply ingrained belief that sex is shameful.
Themes
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When Joe graduates high school, he gets a pair of gold cuff links in the mail, with a card that just says L on it. Soon after, Joe goes to Stumpy Telsa’s to see Laurette, but he learns that she has gone off to a place called Estes Park, where she stays in the nicest hotel for three months and spends all the money she earned over the year. Joe ends up working in the bakery in Los Angeles before she gets back, and so he never sees her again.
Laurette’s lifestyle suggests that she has decided to make the best of her situation: in exchange for working for Stumpy Telsa for most of the year, she gets a few months of freedom to enjoy on her own terms. Laurette’s more matter-of-fact relationship to sex contrasts with Joe’s more hesitant feelings, helping him to realize that not everyone feels shame the same way that he and the other boys in Shale City do.
Themes
In Los Angeles, Joe runs into Bonnie, who went to school with Joe in Shale City and recognizes him in a drug store. Joe pretends to remember her, but he doesn’t. She invites him to come over and see her sometime. She’s a little younger than him but has already had three husbands. Joe finds her agreeable enough, and they have sex a few times.
The change in location from Shale City to Los Angeles coincides with a change in Joe’s attitude toward sex. Some time has passed since Joe last saw Laurette, and in the interval, he has become more open to sex and more casual about it, perhaps reflecting the different values of a big city like Los Angeles and a smaller town like Shale City.
Themes
Abroad during the war, Joe meets Lucky, a Black American woman who works in a Paris brothel and who has a six-year-old-son going to school back in Long Island. She got her nickname from surviving a San Francisco earthquake. Paris is a strange place for the American Joe, and he takes comfort in Lucky, who is one of the few people around who speaks his language.
As Joe gets older, he continues to meet people who lead very different lives than he did. After spending almost all of his life in the western United States, Joe suddenly finds himself halfway across the world in a country where people don’t even speak his language. Although Lucky differs from Joe in many ways, she nevertheless reminds him of home, suggesting that, as much as Joe scoffs at the concept of fighting for a homeland elsewhere in the novel, he nevertheless feels a connection to his home.
Themes
Back in the present, Joe’s thoughts become scattered again, as he pictures various French imagery combined with memories of the war. Eventually, all is silent, and all Joe wants is some peace and rest.
Until recently, Joe was doing a good job of keeping his thoughts in order, but his frustration at not being able to communicate in Morse code combined with his recent sexual experience with his current day nurse have both scrambled his thoughts, showing how emotions can impact the way a person perceives time.
Themes
