While arguably Joe’s whole body is an important symbol in the novel, his arms are particularly significant because they symbolize the connection and comfort that the war took away from Joe when it took away his arms. After being caught in an artillery shell explosion, Joe doesn’t initially know what happens to him, and his slow realization that both his arms have been amputated is his first hint that, while he survived the blast, he might have met a fate worse than death. Arms show up again and again in Joe’s memories of his past, as he recalls holding his girlfriend Kareen close to him one night or comforting his mother after the death of his father. In all these cases, Joe’s arms bring him closer to other people, and they also give him agency—Joe fears that without arms, he might never work again (before he realizes that he’s missing a lot more than just his arms).
When the war takes Joe’s arms, it symbolically takes away both Joe’s relationships with his loved ones and his free will. At the end of the novel, Joe muses that if people could see him out in public, it would force them to confront the horrors of war. However, “regulations” prevent him from leaving the hospital. And, unable to fend for himself due to his injuries, Joe realizes that the public will never see his injuries or the horrors of war they represent. Thus, Joe’s arms also become a symbol of the public’s ignorance of the horrors of war and what war takes from people.
Arms Quotes in Johnny Got His Gun
“That’s not Bill. It may seem like it but it’s not.”
They didn’t sleep very much. Sometimes they dozed off and awakened and found that they were apart and came back to each other and held one another tight very tight as if they had been lost forever and had just found each other all over again.
American generals and English generals shook your hand but since he had no hand to shake maybe this was an Englishman or an American who had decided to follow the French custom because there was no other way to do it.
He felt change through the tips of her fingers and a sharp little twinge of disgust went through him but in spite of the disgust he was responding to the touch responding to the mercy in her heart that caused her to touch him so. Her hands sought out the far parts of his body. They inflamed his nerves with a kind of false passion that fled in little tremors along the surface of his skin.
Arms Symbol Timeline in Johnny Got His Gun
