42 pages • 1 hour read
Dalton TrumboJohnny Got His Gun
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1939A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Book 2, Chapters 11-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book 2, Chapter 11 Summary
Joe is lying in bed trying to think of ways to alleviate his boredom. He does this at first by going through the times tables and considering all the uses of the word “lie.” He then thinks about the characters in David Copperfield and A Christmas Carol. He realizes that he can hardly remember the plots or chapters of any novel, lamenting the fact that he knows so little. Joe decides that he needs to concentrate on an idea and chooses time as the most important topic, as time brings order and sequence into his life.
However, all Joe can recall in terms of time is that it was September 1918 when he was injured in a trench. After that, time became hazy. He sets about trying to track time in the hospital. At first, he does so by attempting to count the seconds and minutes between the nurse’s visits, to work out how many visits there are in a day. He finds though that it is too easy to lose track and get distracted while trying to keep count, as he gets confused between seconds, minutes, and hours.
Joe later realizes that he can still feel the sensations of hot and cold on the remaining skin on his neck. Joe uses the sensations to try and work out, from the change of temperature from cold to warm, when sunrise is. He succeeds, and, in a state of rapture, imagines the smell of dew on the grass. Encouraged by his regained ability to track time, Joe declares, “I have seen the dawn again” (144).
Book 2, Chapter 12 Summary
Joe’s memories of New Year’s Eve in Los Angeles merge with the realization that he has counted three hundred and sixty-five days in the hospital, and so has now established his own calendar and year. He no longer needs to tell the passage of days directly from the feeling of sunrise on his skin anymore either, as he can now work it out by the number of visits by the nurses in a day. Joe uses this newfound sense of time to organize a fantasy world, where he imagines doing different things based on the seasons and the days. For example, “each Sunday afternoon he went for a walk in some woods that were just outside Paris” (148). He imagines spending time with his father in June, going fishing, and sleeping beside Kareen every night.
Joe also wonders about exactly where he is and reasons that he is probably in an English hospital, since he remembers that he was injured with an English regiment. As his identification would have been destroyed, whoever found him would have assumed that he was English. The thought leads Joe to remember the story of “Lazarus” which he had heard occurred opposite the English lines: a German soldier had been shot near the English trench, but his body remained rotting on barbed wire in No Man’s Land. The body stayed there no matter how many times the soldiers tried to get rid of it—even after the English buried “Lazarus,” the body sprang up and landed on the wire again when a shell exploded nearby.
Book 2, Chapter 13 Summary
During the second year since he had figured out how to track time, Joe recalls that not much happened. Likewise with the third year, except that he was moved to a new room. Then one day toward the middle of the fourth year his linen was changed only a day after it had already been changed, when before it had only ever been changed every third day. He was also sprayed with something and given a fresh mask. Joe then feels the vibrations from the floor indicating that five new people have entered his room. At first, he thinks they might be Kareen and his sisters or foreign doctors come to observe him. Joe then feels something heavy being pinned to his chest. He realizes that this is a medal, which makes him angry, as it is given to him by able-bodied generals. The visitors’ vibrations make Joe realize that he can communicate using vibrations himself, by using the tapping of his back against his bed as Morse code. He thus tries to convey “S.O.S” to the next nurse who visits him, but she does not understand or respond.
Book 2, Chapter 14 Summary
In his pre-occupation with tapping to communicate, Joe loses “all track of time” (172) and stops trying to think properly. He stops reflecting on the past or considering the future. The nurses still do not understand his tapping, although one responds by touching him tenderly. This causes Joe to daydream about some of the women he was involved with romantically in his life. He had once fallen in love with a woman called Laurette, who was a sex worker in Shale City when he was a teenager. Another was an American named Lucky whom he met while on leave from the trenches in Paris, who used to crochet on her bed while talking to him.
Book 2, Chapters 11-14 Analysis
By the start of Book 2, Joe has, through concentrated thinking, recovered the ability to distinguish between sleeping and waking states. He has thereby both staved off insanity and regained a key aspect of his humanity. Namely, he has recovered agency and a sense of dignity regarding his own consciousness.
In regaining a way of telling time, Joe helps to re-establish a sense of routine and a sense of connection, as “no matter how far you are separated from other people if you have an idea of time why then you are in the same world with them you are part of them” (130). In contrast, a lack of time means damaging solitude, for “if you lose time the others go on ahead of you and you are left alone [. . .] lost to everything forever” (130). As Joe perceives it, losing a sense of time means being absolutely cut off from others and the world. This is why, Joe reasons, both Robinson Crusoe and the Count of Monte Cristo were so concerned to keep a record of time. It is also why Joe feels euphoric when he regains the ability to track the flow of time by using his skin’s response to temperature. In identifying the sunrise twice and by counting the number of nurses’ visits between the sunrises, he has been “born all over again into the world” (140). Joe’s feeling of being reborn gives him hope and greater control over his situation, helping to lessen his former feelings of inadequacy and extreme dependence.
In regaining a sense of time, Joe also re-establishes his links to the ordinary, everyday life he is now largely deprived of: “he saw the high mountains of Colorado [. . .] And he could see inside the houses where men were getting out of bed [. . .] where wives had sausages and hot cakes and coffee for them” (143). Significantly, Joe’s vision is not an abstract one—it is a link to his hometown and the kinds of commonplace things the people there are doing at the start of each day. Joe’s visions recreate a concrete social world and existence involving homely, familiar sights, smells, and sounds in which he can now vicariously partake, enabling him to transcend his physical isolation. His visions also reaffirm his love for the “ordinary”—his enduring sense that what matters most in life is not a political or abstract ideal, but peaceful simplicity and human connection.
Moreover, Joe’s tracking of time and “rebirth” also prefigures an awakening to the human world that immediately surrounds him in the hospital. Previously, the nurses were an anonymous force to which he was subject but indifferent. Now, with an awareness of time, he starts to distinguish between them based on the times they come and the difference in the touch of their hands. Joe notices that the day nurse has “hands a little hard like the hands of a woman who has worked a long while” (147), which leads him to imagine her as middle-aged, grey-haired and business-like. In contrast, in the case of the night nurses, “their hands were very soft and just moist enough to go bumpily instead of smoothly over his body” (148). Joe pictures these night nurses as young and sensitive. He even believes that one turned out of his room in shock on seeing him and that, based on a feeling on his night shirt, another had cried. Joe thus establishes a sense of the nurses as real human beings with distinct personalities, which in turn leads him to feel more connected to his immediate environment and emphasizes The Importance of Human Connection.
Most importantly of all, Joe’s identification and humanization of the nurses makes it possible for him to establish more genuine, emotional connections with them. With the first nurse, “he always squirmed to let her know he was pleased to see her” (147). She responds to this by patting him on the stomach and running her hand through his hair. Meanwhile, Joe both forgives the nurse who ran away in shock and “lay in pain for hours” (148) in sympathy with the nurse who had cried. Through these limited but vivid connections, Joe is able to recover an important piece of his humanity: He is emotionally reconnected to others and can even empathize with them, thereby entering a period of relative tranquility and acceptance of his condition.
The visit of the generals to give Joe a medal is a significant moment in the novel. First, the vibrations of their approach give Joe the idea of later using tapping to convey messages in Morse code, which will eventually prove to be his most effective way of communicating with the outside world and lead to the novel’s climax. Second, their awarding of a medal to Joe—and Joe’s angry response—emphasizes the inherent cruelty of Joe’s condition and the hypocrisy of the military establishment: What has happened to Joe is a tragedy, but the generals choose to treat Joe’s condition as the noble result of his supposed wartime heroism. Their awarding of the medal renders Joe’s experience as just another piece of pro-war theatrics and exemplifies The Centrality of Control and Propaganda in War. Joe cannot even communicate his own feelings and opinions to the generals due to his injuries. He is furious when he thinks about how the generals visiting him are able-bodied and therefore able to live the ordinary life he dreams about. In this scene, Joe’s growing anti-war sentiments flare up yet again, reminding him of the wide gap between the experiences of ordinary soldiers and those who order them to fight.
