Johnny Got His Gun: SparkNotes Literature Guide by SparkNotes

Author:SparkNotes [Sparknotes Editors]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Study Guides
ISBN: 9781411475977
Publisher: Spark
Published: 2014-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Analysis

Chapters ix and x mark the end of Book I as well as the first climax of the novel. It is in this section, entitled "The Dead," that Joe manages to triumph over his encroaching insanity and develop convictions about his bodily condition and the more general practice of war. By the end of Chapter x it becomes clear to Joe that he has a role to play as the world's first living dead man. He alone exists near to death, yet is alive enough to realize that giving up one's life is not worth anything, including abstract ideals. This message and the convictions behind it give Joe a sense of purpose that he has lacked.

Chapter ix consists of one of Joe's last dream remembrances, this one of his last camping trip with his father. Like some of the other dream memories, this one is dominated by a sense of loss—Joe loses his father's fishing rod, but he also loses the childhood rapport he and his father shared. But this dream memory also involves the beginnings of the political convictions Joe displays in Chapter x. The sections of Chapter ix that explain Joe's family's financial status display dissatisfaction with the capitalist system and a nostalgia for a more pastoral, subsistence farming system. Under a system of subsistence pastoralism, Joe's father would be a success, as he grows enough food for his family to eat quite well. Joe's father is only a failure under the capitalist system that requires men to make surplus capital to purchase goods. Joe's nostalgia for pastoralism also involves a preference for local identification—first with family, then possibly with community—over a national identity. This tendency then plays into Joe's feelings about war voiced in Chapter x.

Joe's convictions about war in Chapter x center around a deep skepticism regarding the motives of the undefined "they"—those who organized and called for the war, yet did not fight in it. Joe's skepticism extends to language as well. He distrusts words without concrete referents, such as "house." These abstract words can convey different meanings, and they ultimately offer inadequate substance when placed on the other end of a bargain with one's life. Thence comes Joe's sense of having been cheated and manipulated. The form of Chapter x works in some of the same ways that a persuasive piece of writing or a speech would. Joe repeats many of his phrases for emphasis, even repeating words such as "democracy" and "liberty" so often as to sap them of all meaning—they simply become repetitive sounds. Joe also speaks periodically to a second person—imaginatively, another man being talked into going to war. But Joe also appears to address us here; the chapter works didactically, with the aim to teach.

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