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Chapter 19
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Johnny Got His Gun, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Horrors of War
The Value of Life
Elites vs. Common People
Time and Memory
Summary
Analysis
The people leave the room, and Joe is alone again. Joe gets anxious, wondering if he made a mistake with his tapping, just as he sometimes did while keeping time. Eventually, the Doctor comes back. He taps against Joe’s forehead to tell him that what he asked for (“Let me out”) is against the regulations. He asks who Joe is.
Joe continues to deal with the issue of what to do with his life after achieving his goal of communicating with the outside world. Ultimately, he faces disappointment when he learns from the man (presumably one of the hospital’s doctors) that it’s against regulations for him to leave the hospital. While Joe is asking to physically go outside, the question also has symbolic meaning, showing how Joe remains trapped in his current situation, unable to advance in life due to the regulations.
Themes
Joe realizes with horror that the people he’s communicating with now might be his last chance. It seems like what they want most is a way to get Joe off their consciences. Joe starts tapping, saying again that he wants out. He wants to feel the air outside of the hospital he’s been inside for so many years. He wants to be less lonely. But soon he realizes that the Doctor is preparing an injection, presumably to silence Joe with painkillers again.
Before they realized Joe could talk back, the doctors and army officials treated Joe’s survival as a triumph. His inability to communicate allowed them to turn him into a symbol that suited their purposes. But when they find out Joe still has his own agency and ideas, he stops being useful and instead becomes a hindrance. While the painkillers physically tranquilize Joe, they also stand in for all the other techniques that authority figures use to metaphorically silence “little guys” like Joe.
Themes
Joe doesn’t want to submit to the painkillers. He keeps tapping “Why? Why? Why?” He suddenly has a vision of himself as a new Christ surveying an apocalyptic world where mothers without arms hold babies without heads. He feels that after he told the strangers his secret, they have revealed theirs to him: that they are preparing for a new war and that Joe is a problem because he reminds people what war is like.
While this passage might seem to refer to World War II, the book was written before WWII and published just two days after the start of that war. Both Joe’s mother and arms represent comfort, and so Joe’s apocalyptic vision of mothers without arms suggests that these future mothers will be powerless to comfort their children. Meanwhile, the babies without heads are like Joe (who is missing his face), perhaps standing in for the many children who will die in the future wars that Joe predicts.
Themes
Joe imagines the excuses that people will use to justify future wars. He imagines himself with the people who make things, talking to the people who start wars. He imagines a future where people take up guns and seem to be following the orders of the war’s master planners, but this time they aim their weapons at the true enemies: the people who plan wars in the first place.
Like the novel as a whole, the final lines are grim but hopeful. Joe seems to accept that he may never achieve this dream of leaving the hospital, and he fears that people will soon repress their memories of the horrors of war just as regulations keep Joe himself (whose body clearly demonstrates the consequences of war) locked out of sight in the hospital. Nevertheless, while Joe doesn’t believe he’ll ever see a world without war, he hopes it might one day be possible if common people can communicate with each other and unite behind a common goal.
Themes
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