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Chapter 1
Themes
and Colors
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
One fall, in Shale City, Colorado, before Joe went to war, Joe’s mother sings in the kitchen while baking bread. Between baking, canning, and making jams and jellies, his mother spends most of the fall working in the kitchen. His mother really likes the hamburgers from the hamburger man downtown who some people claim is a “dope fiend” but who is harmless and makes the best hamburgers around. Joe’s father used to bring some home for her on Saturday nights.
Parts of Joe’s childhood take inspiration from author Dalton Trumbo’s own Colorado childhood. This passage emphasizes the “all-American” nature of Joe’s childhood, with references to a close nuclear family and the typically American food of hamburgers, although rumors of the hamburger man using drugs suggests that there is more than meets the eye in Shale City.
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Fall in Shale City usually means snow, often before Thanksgiving. Joe’s father always wakes him early on the first snowfall of the season. Joe loves the snow, and after looking out the window at it, he puts on his heavy clothes to go outside.
This chapter goes through a typical year in Shale City. One of the most significant effects of Joe’s injury from the bomb blast is that he loses his sense of time, and so in a way, this chapter is his first attempt to regain his sense of time. While the novel features many flashback, technically it all takes place in the present, with the segments set in the past implied to be dreams and hallucinations that Joe experiences as he recovers at the hospital.
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In spring, the snow melts and primroses grow in the vacant lots. One spring, Lincoln Beechy comes to Shale City, in the first airplane anyone in town has ever seen. Everyone gets excited to see Lincoln Beechy, amazed that he risks his life in his fragile-looking airplane, even doing loop-de-loops. The arrival of Lincoln Beechy suggest that Shale City is becoming a real city, like Denver or Salt Lake City. A school superintendent gives a speech about how planes like Lincoln’s will one day unite the world in peace. A few months later, Lincoln drowns when his airplane crashes into the San Francisco Bay.
Joe’s birthday is in December. His mother always makes him a big dinner, and he invites his friends over. All his friends like his father, and his father likes them back.
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County fair week in the fall is the biggest week of the year in Shale City, in some ways even bigger than Christmas. A carnival comes to town with magicians, stunt motorcycle riders, and rows of stalls selling sweets and produce. The fair grounds are a popular date location for people who can’t afford to go to dances.
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One day, Joe’s father decides to move the family from Shale City to Los Angeles. Although old men in Shale City’s cigar store used to talk about the war in Europe sometimes, Joe begins to really hear about the war—and particularly Germany’s atrocities—in Los Angeles. In Los Angeles, Joe’s father dies, the U.S. enters the war, and ultimately Joe goes off to war himself. That brings him to his current condition—deaf and in pain in a hospital. Joe thinks that he should never have gotten involved in the war in the first place.
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