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liz_156 's review for:
Johnny Got His Gun
by Dalton Trumbo
It's amazingly sad and depressing how relevant this 1933 protest novel is to 1942 and 1955 and 2001, and hell, even 2022, all of it's so sad. It reads like a true stream of conciseness, so in that way, grammar and proper sentence structure are sometimes thrown out the window in favor of mindless rambles. However, this is the point, to make it feel like you are a part of Joe, and make his mental decay and torture yours. I found it difficult to get into and hard to follow so reading along with an audiobook helped with some of the middle parts that are more words just strung together. The last two chapters' monologues were the most hard-hitting of the entire book. The message and the prose were just moving in a way that I can't really describe, I don't know, it just hit me. I think it's because no matter what this keeps happening, and nothing can stop it. One thing that I thought would erk me but didn't was the complete lack of a plot and sometimes even a story. Because it takes place post-bomb attack, the first section is "The dead", and shows Joe's life before the military as well as him becoming what he would later refer to as a stump (getting the dead parts of himself cut off). This means that sometimes they are legitimately just long, kinda boring stories of someone's life, either way, the 2nd half makes up for it. This is a ramble now, I'm going to sleep.