Johnny Got His Gun

Joe’s own military experiences and his memories of other soldiers consistently convey the toll that war takes upon a soldier’s mind and body. Throughout Johnny Got His Gun, wartime service is relentlessly de-heroized, with a particular emphasis placed on the ways in which war-related trauma manifests itself physically, emotionally, and mentally in survivors.   

As Joe begins to regain lucidity in the hospital, he is shocked to discover the catastrophic extent of his physical injuries. As someone left deaf, blind, mute, and without limbs after multiple amputations, Joe experiences his transformation as “a full-grown man suddenly being stuffed back into his mother’s body” (83) due to his state of utter dependency. Joe cannot even feed himself, as “somewhere sticking in his stomach was a tube they fed him through” (83)—yet another feature that is “exactly like the womb” (83). A machine allows Joe to breathe, while nurses deal with his urine and excrement, as well as washing him and controlling the conditions of his environment. Like a baby, Joe spends much of the novel unable to communicate beyond basic physical reactions, as when he attempts to show his pleasure at a nurse’s visit: “he always squirmed to let her know he was pleased to see her” (147).

Joe’s injuries also have a serious impact upon his mental state. In struggling with his total dependency, he experiences various fluctuating emotions such as hopelessness, grief, and rage. At times he is grateful for the companionship of the nurses; at other times he deeply resents them. The sense of physical infantilization he undergoes leads to a simultaneous emotional regression to a more childlike state. At times, he almost literally cries out for his mother: “I’m having a nightmare mother, where are you? Pick me up. Rockabye baby. Now I lay me down to sleep [. . .] Hold me I’m scared” (65). When he is awoken from a nightmare by a nurse’s touch, “he felt like a child that has awakened weeping from a nightmare to find itself safe and snug in its mother’s arms” (97). There is a streak of irony here in the way that war—often conceived of as the most traditionally strong and “masculine” of activities—leads to Joe’s reversion to a state of utter physical weakness and emotional vulnerability. War has not enhanced Joe’s sense of masculinity, heroism, or agency—rather, it has robbed him of all three things.

Furthermore, Joe’s wartime flashbacks emphasize how the sight of what happens to other soldiers can also lead to mental trauma in survivors. When Joe thinks about the various injuries soldiers have suffered in the war, he tells the story of a coal miner whose “face had been burned off by a flare one night” (88). On returning to his home from the front, his wife let out a scream and chopped off his head before killing their three children. The police later found her in a pub with a beer, where “she was trying to eat the glass the beer came in” (88)—a clear sign of her trauma-induced dissociation from reality. Joe also recalls seeing shell-shocked soldiers who “ran around on all fours and stuck their heads in corners when they were frightened” (88). The soldiers’ shellshock causes them to revert to a dehumanized, animal-like state in their posture “on all fours” and their prey-like tendencies to conceal themselves when frightened. Finally, there is the story of “Lazarus,” the nickname given to a decaying corpse of a Prussian officer that remains immoveable despite multiple attempts to shoot it down and even bury it. Consequently, a young British officer tries to be heroic and goes out on his own to move the body. The officer trips on barbed wire and “struck his arm clean-up to the shoulder through Lazarus” (158). The experience is so traumatizing for the officer that he has a permanent mental breakdown, ending up “somewhere in a hospital behind barred windows yelling and crying and brooding forever” (158). Throughout all of these stories, one unifying theme remains dominant: war is dehumanizing, not heroic, and the scars it inflicts on survivors are both terrible and inescapable.