Johnny Got His Gun Critical Lens Essay

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Truth is that which is true or in accordance with fact or reality and remains incontrovertible. In portraying a false truth an opportunity is made to manipulate a situation. A false truth is a form of disinformation—a particularly convincing untruth. False truth is highly constructed and used by those in power to harbor it’s people from chaos, to maintain a balance in a civilization, to control a nation for the greater good, or abuse its power to govern and suppress those inferior to the elite and dominant, majorly those in power. Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun and John Maxwell Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians use protagonists that both wish to reveal the truth of events in a dominating empire but the truth is simply that in which they cannot reveal.
Dalton Trumbo’s novel, Johnny Got His Gun, takes into account the effects of war and illustrates its wounds and the truth behind the battlefield while expressing a strong anti-war theme. Taking place during World War I, the novel is told in third person and follows Joe Bonham, the main character, through his memories and flashbacks as he slowly comes to the realization that he cannot see, hear, speak or smell along with the realization that both his arms and legs have been amputated …show more content…

With the power to influences economic, political, or social well-being, false news spreads faster than an actual truth. The differences observed between a false truth and actual truth effect emotional reactions of individuals. For example, an impactful media that helps distribute true and false news stories is Twitter. Here, false truths diffuse farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth seen in a majority of all kinds of information. Ranging from false political news to terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends, or financial information, the false news is more novel than true news (Vosoughi