While Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun is a grim novel about the horrors of war, it also celebrates the value of life, particularly in Book II, which is called “The Living.” While the protagonist Joe is despondent and perhaps even suicidal in the first part of the book, as the novel progresses, he takes tentative steps to try to make the most of his new life without arms, legs, or a face. During one of the most famous sections of the book, Joe recites a long internal monologue where he considers the reasons why people go to war. The politicians and generals who start wars (and who rarely face danger themselves), often appeal to abstract principles, suggesting that a person should be willing to sacrifice their life for the sake of a larger ideal like liberty, democracy, or honor. Joe dismantles these common arguments, ultimately concluding that no ideal is more important than life itself—at least not any ideal Joe has ever encountered.
Once Joe comes to this conclusion about the value of life, he tries to make the most of his dire condition. When he finally manages to communicate with one of the day nurses by using Morse code, it’s the happiest Joe has ever felt in his life—even including back when he still had all his senses. The fact that Joe can find joy, even in his severely injured condition, suggests that all life is valuable because people can find ways to adapt to even the most adverse conditions. While Joe adapts to his new reality in the hospital and at times even manages to find joy despite his severe injuries, the book ultimately suggests that the real death and destruction that war causes aren’t worth the abstract principles like freedom or safety that it purports to defend.
Related Themes from Other Texts
The Value of Life ThemeTracker
The Value of Life Quotes in Johnny Got His Gun
“That’s not Bill. It may seem like it but it’s not.”
Where did they get that stuff about bombproof dugouts when a man in one of them could be hit so hard that the whole complicated business of his ears could be blown away leaving him deaf so deaf he couldn’t hear his own heart beat?
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.
He couldn’t live like this because he would go crazy. But he couldn’t die because he couldn’t kill himself. If he could only breathe he could die. That was funny but true.
He thought about it afterward. It didn’t matter whether the rat was gnawing on your buddy or a damned German it was all the same. Your real enemy was the rat and when you saw it there fat and well fed chewing on something that might be you why you went nuts.
He saw he had to do it. Because if he couldn’t tell being awake from being asleep why he couldn’t even consider himself a grown-up person.
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.
He thought if I never have anything else I will always have dawn and morning sunlight.
Oh god the happy happy new year he had counted three hundred and sixty-five days and now it was new year’s eve.
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.
Now he understood. The old nurse had left to spend the christmas holidays away from him and this new nurse this young lovely beautiful understanding new nurse was wishing him merry christmas. He nodded back at her frantically and his nod meant merry christmas to you merry christmas oh a merry merry christmas.
What do you want?
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.
