Johnny Got His Gun Literary Analysis

From Dalton Trumbo’s novel, Johnny Got His Gun, a 15-year old boy and his father travel to one of their most cherished places during childhood, a lake 9,000 feet above sea level. This time, though, rather than spending every moment with his father, the boy now wishes to hang out with one of his friends, Bill Harper, instead. The special bondage between the young man and his father is now steadily quieting itself as the young teen feels a sense of abandonment and guilt towards his old man. With this being said, Trumbo, the author, utilizes a limited point of view, an intricate tone, and selection of detail to relay the fact that there are times in life where a transition is inevitable and that one must come to an understanding of those feelings …show more content…
After Joe tells his father about his plans to go fishing with Bill Harper it would be expected that his father would show more emotion than he does. It is only through Trumbo’s use of short sentences and his reliance on the reader’s own experiences that it is understood how upset the father really is. The short sentences mimic how the conversation lacked flow. It made it seem choppy and in turn allows the reader to pick up on how awkward and bittersweet the encounter was. The sentence where the father says, “I don’t want to go fishing tomorrow anyhow.” Perfectly sums up how much he actually does want to go fishing but knows his son would rather go fishing with his friend. Later in the passage, Trumbo gives the reader a summary of how much the father’s fishing rod meant to him. In a way, the rod acts as a parallel to the loving relationship the father and son have because of how the reader knows that ‘each summer’ they go on a fishing trip and ‘each spring’ his father gets the rod cleaned up. In doing so, Trumbo implies that the break in the tradition is the equivalent to changing the close bond they had. The father ends up giving his ‘treasured’ fishing rod to his son in the same way he gave him his love as a father. In the end, Trumbo decides to exclude the morning meeting between Bill Harper and the father to highlight the inevitability of the change in relationship as one gets older and more independent.
Throughout the passage, Dalton Trumbo creates a realistic encounter in his coming of age story. Trumbo expertly utilized the complex point of view and changing the tone to highlight the bittersweet feeling of change. He simultaneously captures how it feels to break traditions and acknowledges the impact it has on the relationships around