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 wants to break his constant cycle of sinking and rising. He wants to think clearly. He feels that his bandages are gone, meaning a lot of time has passed. Everything is so still that he feels like he’s back in the womb. He regrets that he’ll never again see the faces of the people who make him happy, like Kareen, and that he’ll never walk again.
At the end of Chapter V, Joe was in despair and even feeling suicidal. This chapter shows him trying to get his life back together, perhaps motivated in part by the life of Jose (detailed in Chapter VI), who had little but made the most of what he had.
Themes
Joe wonders how he’s still alive when he hears so many stories of people dying suddenly and unexpectedly. He wonders if maybe he isn’t dying, and if after a solid three or four years of practice during the war, doctors have finally gotten good enough at keeping people like him alive. He knows his blindness and deafness aren’t unusual for someone who gets hit by an artillery shell, and plenty of people live with their condition. Joe wonders how he avoided bleeding to death and recalls how he heard the maggots in a wound are a good thing because they keep out gangrene. He’s heard all sorts of stories about soldiers surviving serious wounds, with tubes of all kinds keeping them alive.
The more time Joe spends in the hospital, the more cynical he gets, particularly about the function of the hospital itself. While this passage describes the extraordinary technology that keeps Joe alive, it also hints at how new technology was also the reason Joe got injured in the first place (he was caught in the blast of an artillery shell explosion).
Themes
Joe feels that he has to be a sort of triumph for the doctors, given everything they had to do to keep him alive. He feels like he’s won the lottery in reverse, becoming so unlucky it’s hard to fathom. He realizes that he has a cloth mask over most of his face, probably so that the nurses don’t have to look at it. He tries to move his head to get the mask off. He realizes he can make a small rocking motion but can’t do much else. He’s 20 years old and hasn’t been sick a day in his life, but now he can’t even roll over.
Joe resents how the doctors view him as a triumph, when in fact, he feels that it’s a failure that he ended up in the hospital in the first place. When Joe realizes that he’s wearing a mask, he figures out that the mask isn’t for his benefit but for the benefit of the nurses who treat him. People don’t want to look at Joe’s mutilated body, and this represents people’s unwillingness to confront the horrors of war in general.
Themes
Joe notices a hole in his side that hasn’t healed yet. He feels moisture dripping in the area. He remembers visiting a friend in a hospital ward where lots of men had holes that wouldn’t heal and smelled like a corpse. He figures maybe he’s lucky he lost his nose after all.
The gory details of Joe’s condition once again question the narrative that his survival is some kind of medical triumph. The focus on sensory details like the awful smell of the wound helps to highlight the horror of Joe’s condition.
Themes
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Joe feels himself slipping away, yet not quite fainting, as the place he’s in gets dimmer. He feels the claws and whiskers of a rat climbing on him near his wound, but he can’t do anything about it. He remembers the face of a Prussian officer he once saw, after he and his company swarmed some German trenches. As the man lay immobile in the trench, a rat ate his face, causing several of the men in Joe’s company to shout and beat the rat to a pulp.
Like the ringing telephone, the rat is another symbol of approaching death in the story. To the outside world, Joe is about as dead as the Prussian officer, and the rat makes no distinction between Joe and a corpse. The strong reaction of the soldiers in Joe's company to the rat eating a dead man's face shows how eager they are to try to repress their fear of death and personal injury.
Themes
Joe feels the rat eating his flesh near the edges of his wound. He wonders where the nurse is. He tries to rock to knock the rat off, but it seems to like this. Joe knows that rats are smart and that if it evades capture, it will keep coming back to eat little parts of him, day after day.
Without his arms or legs, Joe is powerless to stop the rat from eating him alive. The idea that the rat would keep coming back to gradually eat little parts of him illustrates Joe’s mortality and how he’s in the process of dying.
Themes
