Analysis Of Johnny Got His Gun By Trumbo

In this passage from his book Johnny Got His Gun, Trumbo shares the developing relationship between a young man and his father as they grow older. As the son transitions from childhood to young adulthood, he begins to explore the world without his father by his side. The change that occurs in the relationship between the young man and his father is an inevitable change that can only be accepted with an open mind and an understanding heart. By using a third person omniscient point of view, significantly small details, and a variation in sentence structure, Trumbo is able to write a sentimental passage about how a father and son’s relationship is so strong that its foundation will never break in spite of changes caused by life and time.

Even if the relationship that the father and son share has an indestructible foundation that bonds them together, the changes that occur with them aging slowly changes the surface of their relationship, which Trumbo hints with small details. When the father allowed his son to go fishing with Bill Harper he also said, “I’m tired and I think I’ll rest all day” (40-41). Sometimes you can’t expand small details, but Trumbo might’ve added this detail of the father’s tiresome to show that the father is getting old too. More so, this small detail contributes to characterizing the young man and father’s relationship as slowly changing on both ends without losing it’s strong foundation. The father and son may be getting older and spending less time together, but their love as father and son fortifies their relationship and prevents it from completely changing, which is exemplified when the father allows his son to use his rod to go fishing. The father’s rod is said to be “the only extravagance his father had had in his whole life” (45-46), meaning that the rod is of great significance to the father. Almost a whole paragraph is about how important the rod is to the father, and that’s not a detail included for decoration in Trumbo’s writing. Knowing that the father values his rod and invests time and money in it to

Gathering the courage to tell his father that he was going to go fishing with his friend was hard for the young man to do because he knows it would change their regular routine of fishing together and possibly hurt his father. While contemplating on how he should tell his father, the young man thought, “It was a very serious thing” (16). In contrast to all the long sentences, the fact that this sentence is short emphasizes the importance of how the young man’s new idea of going with his friend instead of his father changes his relationship with his father. However, the young man and father’s relationship won’t completely change because they will always have a strong foundation, which they created when the young man was still a kid and they spent a lot of time together. The young man and the father spent so much time together while the man was a kid to the point that “his father had always preferred his company to that of men and he had always preferred his father’s company to that of the other guys” (20-22). The parallel structure of this sentence shows that the father always preferred his son’s company just as much as his son preferred his company. Furthermore, this conveys that they don’t have an unrequited relationship and that the feeling of wanting to be with each other was always