When Joe loses his hearing and sight when an artillery shell explodes, he also loses all concept of time, and so he struggles to distinguish between past and present, often slipping back into memories from his old life in a series of memories and hallucinations. Although Joe’s father is dead before the novel even begins, he nevertheless plays a major role in the story through Joe’s memories of his childhood back in Shale City, Colorado. Joe remembers key formative moments from his childhood, like when he had to tell his father that he lost his father’s treasured fishing rod, emphasizing how even after the dramatic things that happened to Joe in the war, these small memories from home continue to be important to him. Joe’s father (as well as others, like Joe’s mother, his friend Bill Harper, and his girlfriend Kareen) all helped shape who Joe is, and Joe’s memories of growing up in Shale City and working at a bakery in Los Angeles are so vivid that he can return to them even after losing all his senses.
Because of this strong relationship between past and present, it’s a major turning point in the novel when Joe finally manages to find a way to keep track of time again. Just as early humans used the movement of the stars to measure time, Joe pays attention to the things outside his small world, like the coming and going of nurses and changes in temperature. Although Joe struggles at first, he finally learns to keep track of time, even keeping track of whole years in his head. Getting better track of time gives Joe better control over his thoughts, and as the novel progresses, he is less likely to unintentionally slip into the past, giving him more autonomy despite his incapacitated condition. In Johnny Got His Gun, Trumbo explores the human psyche, showing how memory shapes a person’s identity and how a person’s concept of time affects the structure of their life and gives them greater agency to shape it.
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Time and Memory ThemeTracker
Time and Memory Quotes in Johnny Got His Gun
He wished the phone would stop ringing. It was bad enough to be sick let alone have a phone ring all night long.
“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?
After the speech Lincoln Beechy looped the loop five times and left town. A couple months later his airplane fell into San Francisco Bay and Lincoln Beechy drowned.
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.
“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.
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.
He felt a little lump in his throat that even as he was deserting his father for Bill Harper his father had volunteered the rod.
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.
Outside the crowds were yelling and the bands were playing and here he was with four or five guys in a quiet little room and they were playing blackjack when Christ came up from Tucson and walked in on them.
