Johnny Got His Gun

Johnny Got His Gun is by Dalton Trumbo. The main character is Joe Bonham. He went to

war in the 1917. While there he got his arms, legs, and face blown up; he was a "living piece of meat". The doctors thought that there was no feeling, no thought in his body. However, they were wrong, but they let him live with no sense of time and not being able to see, hear, speak, smell, or even touch without it being on his chest. The right of living is a privilege to many, but being hooked up to machines to live and survive is not living but, in a way, dying.

Without the means of being able to perform everyday functions, and not being able to tell the difference between dreams and reality, Joe has many dreams that he believes to be real. He sees the face of Jesus , who gives him advice on how to tell and know the diffe

. . .

The nurse later finds out that Joe does have feeling and real thoughts. She opens the window to give him a sense of days and nights. rence between reality and his dreams. And they took away the right he had to freely die because of an experiment that they thought would prove to be a good test or how to keep the meat alive on isolation and anger of the outside world. She speaks to him through writing on his chest. It may have given him a sense of peace and a glimpse into reality, because of the nurse, but he still can not perform everyday functions.

Joe can not speak to enforce what he wants done with his life, because the doctors realize that he is their creation and he should be locked up from the outside world. The doctors finally come in and discover what they have done: preserve a living, knowing being. However, Johnny is talking to himself and trying to make peace with himself, about which reality is real.