At the center of Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun is the conflict between politicians, generals, and other leaders who start wars and the common people like Joe who actually do the fighting. Protagonist Joe is an “average Joe” who goes to fight in World War I and becomes another battlefield casualty statistic, literally losing his identity when an artillery shell explosion blows off most of his face. It is only after Joe spends some time in isolation in the hospital—with no arms, legs, sight, or hearing—that he begins to understand the enormous power imbalance between him and the people who actually make the decisions in war. The more Joe reflects on the issue, the more he realizes that the interests of the “little guys” who actually fight in wars don’t align with the interests of the leaders who start wars. At the end of the novel, Joe imagines what might happen if instead of pointing their weapons at their alleged wartime enemies, common people pointed their guns at their true oppressors: the leaders in charge of war. But Joe is powerless to spread his message because even after learning how to communicate with the hospital staff, they deny him his one wish to leave the hospital, instead keeping him locked up due to “regulations.” Joe’s status as a de facto prisoner in the hospital reflects the powerlessness of ordinary people to oppose authority figures.
The book also examines how class can widen the power imbalance between the privileged and the underprivileged. Joe is shocked the first time he and Howie go out into the desert to work on building a railroad as part of a crew where most of the other workers are Mexican. The Mexican workers endure conditions so harsh that Joe and Howie can only endure one day before they decide to head back to Shale City, realizing that their own problems back home are insignificant compared to the problems that people with less privilege face, and how the railroad workers’ exhausting conditions trap them in a cycle, leaving them with little time or energy to do anything else. Ultimately, Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun suggests that the most important conflict in society is not between different countries but between people with power and people without power—and that society maintains the status quo by preventing the powerless from rising up against the empowered.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Elites vs. Common People ThemeTracker
Elites vs. Common People Quotes in Johnny Got His Gun
“It’s just like this. For fellows like you and me to be out her slaving our best years away on a section gang is just as if girls nice girls like Onie and Diane suddenly decided to become washerwomen.”
The guys from the mission came stinking of disinfectant and looking very bedraggled and embarrassed. They knew that anyone who smelled the disinfectant knew they were bums on charity. They didn’t like that and how could you blame them? They were always humble and when they were bright enough they worked hard.
Somebody said let’s go out and fight for liberty and so they went and got killed without ever once thinking about liberty. And what kind of liberty were they fighting for anyway? How much liberty and whose idea of liberty? Were they fighting for the liberty of eating free ice cream cones all their lives or for the liberty of robbing anybody they pleased whenever they wanted to or what?
There’s nothing noble about dying. Not even if you die for honor. Not even if you die the greatest hero the world ever saw.
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 thought of the slaves who built the pyramids thousands of them tens of thousands of them spending their whole lives to put up a dead monument to a dead king. He thought of the slaves who fought each other in the Coliseum in Rome for the entertainment of big guys who sat in the boxes and held their thumbs up or down to give the slaves life or death.
The hotel manager looked out into the darkness and saw Mary’s white anxious face there. She’s a pretty kid he thought and scared too like her husband says. It’ll be an awful mess if she has a baby on the premises people who can’t afford them shouldn’t have babies anyway but what are you going to do about it?
Take me into your churches your great towering cathedrals that have to be rebuilt every fifty years because they are destroyed by war. Carry me in my glass box down the aisles where kings and priests and brides and children at their confirmation have gone so many times before to kiss a splinter of wood from a true cross on which was nailed the body of a man who was lucky enough to die.
Why didn’t they want him? Why were they shutting the lid of the coffin against him? Why didn’t they want him to speak? Why didn’t they want him to be seen? Why didn’t they want him to be free?
Make no mistake of it we will live. We will be alive and we will walk and talk and eat and sing and laugh and feel and love and bear our children in tranquility in security in decency in peace. You plan the wars you masters of men plan the wars and point the way and we will point the gun.
