Review: Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo

Challenges: 

Diversity Bingo 2017: Main character with underrepresented body

This book follows a soldier who wakes up in hospital after a bomb has hit his posting. Slowly he realizes that he is deaf and blind, and then to his horror he discovers that he has also lost his arms and legs. We follow his musings as he slowly comes to term with these findings and tries to find a way to deal with it. He spends a lot of time trying to figure out how to keep time and then he tries to find a way to communicate with the world around him, but the world doesn’t seem too interested. In between his hard work to communicate he dwells on memories of his life before the war and daydreams about his family finding him again. 

This book was absolutely heartbreaking. Here is this man who has been saved when everything else around him crumbled to dust, but the people who saved him (or condemned him to a life trapped in his own mind) aren’t interested in him as a person, only as a trophy of their own medical abilities and as a thing to pin a medal on. 

It is written in the 1930s and the war is the First World War, but essentially it could be any war. The waste of lives and the use of young men as cannon fodder by old men behind the lines who don’t give a damn what happens to them should they be lucky enough to survive is a factor in all wars. 

As for the challenge this definitely fit. I don’t think we see many stories about amputees. But while it was definitely interesting, I had hoped for a story about how an amputee manages the world around them. But it was still interesting to see just how much life can be lived inside the mind. 

I gave this book 4 stars out of 5.