Luke’s Reviews > Johnny Got His Gun > Status Update

Morse Code is undefeated in fiction. I need to learn it just so I can write a story where it’s an important plot device. I wonder how this book is gonna end, I feel like Trumbo is gonna pull the rug out from under Joe right as he’s starting to get some hope.

In this chapter Joe finally made contact with another human being outside of his own brain. A nurse traced the words “Merry Christmas” on his chest and then he started thinking about his family and the story of the first Christmas. I will say it again, this does not at all feel like a book written in the 30s.

In this chapter, Joe has a drug induced hallucination that he is at a train station in a desert, playing cards with Christ and a bunch of dead men, and when he tells the dead men what happened to him, they all said “damn he’s worse off than us” and then Christ rode away wearing purple robes on top of a train. There’s some allegory or symbolism here that I don’t fully get but I don’t care in the slightest!

In this short chapter Joe (and by proxy I guess Dalton Trumbo) compares being drafted into war with the slaves in Ancient Rome who were forced to fight in the colosseum as gladiators. I never made this connection before. This is the best book ever. Imagine being trapped inside your own brain with absolutely no way out and no one even knows you’re still conscious in there.

In this chapter Joe thinks about all of the prostitutes he’s encountered in his life and then starts to go a little insane

I should really learn Morse code, it always comes so in handy in books and movies.

I can see why conservatives like banning this book. It took 150 pages for there to be an actual war scene in this anti-war novel, and it’s just a scene about a bunch of British soldiers who don’t want to bury a Bavarian corpse stuck on the barbed wire fence, so they just shoot it down whenever they get the chance hoping it falls into a hole in the ground. It kinda gave me “Paths of Glory” vibes.

Really insane chapter where Joe tries to figure out what time of the day it is while he’s trapped in his sightless, soundless, limbless existence. This book is making me question and reconsider things about my own existence. It’s so good that I actually bought a DVD for the first time since high school instead of a Blu-Ray/4K (the film version doesn’t have a Blu-Ray release so I had to get the DVD).

If anyone ever unironically says “men used to go to war” to me ever again, I’m just gonna throw this book at them. I wish I could print out thousands of copies of this chapter and hand them out at every military recruitment center in the country.

Is this the best book I’ve ever read? Maybe I’m just being a prisoner of the moment but goddamn. It’s affecting me so deeply in ways that I didn’t expect. This chapter was all about Joe the protagonist’s last fishing trip with his father, and it’s so beautifully devastating that it made me start to tear up. Dalton Trumbo was a genius, can’t wait to see how he made this into a movie.