Johnny Got His Gun: Fishing with Father Anonymous 9th Grade

Dalton Trumbo is perhaps best known for his Communist viewpoints and for his involvement in the HUAC committee in Hollywood and for his work in the movie industry. However, Trumbo’s novels are widely regarded as some of his best work. In one of those esteemed and probably best-known novels, Johnny Got His Gun, Dalton Trumbo uses a third-person point of view and stream of consciousness-like syntax to characterize the exceptionally complex and changing relationship between the young man and his father.

Trumbo’s book is structured in an exceptionally unique way. The most striking aspect of its structure is Trumbo’s extensive use of flashback. The passage about the main characters fishing trip with his father is an example of Trumbo’s use of flashback, as it is written in a reflective point of view of the young man on a camping trip with his father and his friend. “They had been coming to this place ever since he was seven,” says Trumbo, “Now he was fifteen and Bill Harper was going to come tomorrow… Tomorrow for the first time in all trips together he wanted to go fishing with someone other than his father (Trumbo). While the third-person point of view somewhat isolates the reader from the situation, it also makes it more...