11th Grade Humanities Honors 

Honors Blog: Johnny Got His Gun, Chapter 1-10,     9-24-23

Johnny Got His Gun takes place in the mind of a man named Joe. Joe fought in World War I for the United States Army. During his time in combat, he saw many gruesome and horrifying things and lost many friends. At some point during the war, his body was seriously destroyed and he lost all of his limbs as well as access to all of his senses except touch. For the first few chapters, he is in a state of uncertainty about what is real and what isn’t while slowly understanding his current state. He has a difficult time coping and dealing with this. He feels many strong emotions like anger, pain, and hate. All of these factors lead to many challenges. For example, he has a very hard time telling when he is truly awake or is just asleep. If I were in this situation I don’t know how I would go about dealing with this and I think that I would just fall into insanity. But our protagonist Joe finds a way around this by only thinking about the future when he is awake, this is because when he is dreaming he seems to always bring up the past. It looks like Joe is still gripping on tight to whatever he still considers normal existence. He knows that the second he gives up on trying he will be dead since he already considers himself as close to death as possible without actually being dead. This is very much true when you actually think about it, all he really has left is his conscience and touch. Without touch, he would probably lose sanity and once he has lost sanity then he might as well be considered dead. If you have no senses left then how could you even tell that you're alive? What if once you die then all you have left is a form of your consciousness, if that is the case then wouldn’t Joe’s state be the same as death? Reading this book has made me appreciate the simple things in life and I will definitely attempt to bring out these emotions in the reader. Throughout the book Joe has been slipping in and out of dreams and memories, he often replays these as there isn't much else to do. Throughout the book, we've been moving up in the timeline through his memories and are working our way to the point in time of the incident that caused this. We learn much about his childhood and early adulthood leading up to his time in the war. We learn about Joe’s childhood and the environment he grew up in, he has a Mother, a Father, and a Sister. His father and mother were very loving, he was never hungry growing up and would bond with them very much. He would often go fishing with his Father and would do other things like going to visit him at work and enjoying hamburgers together. Although it's evident that his relationship with his mother was great it seems like he had a deeper relationship with his father. Unfortunately for Joe, his father would pass away during his early Adulthood. We know that Joe lived in a place called Shale City which was revealed to be somewhere along the Colorado River. He had a friend named Bill and they would hang out a lot and ended up going through a lot together. Joe didn’t have the best time with one of his relationships though and it turned out that Joe’s girlfriend cheated on him with Bill which really hurt his feelings a lot. At some point, Joe and his family had to move to Los Angeles and this meant that he had to leave another one of his girlfriends named Kareen, he stayed with her on the last night before departing for Los Angeles by train. In Los Angeles we know that he worked in a bakery, he remembers a lot about the bakery and from what we know so far that was the place he worked at before leaving for the war in Europe. Fridays were always particularly busy which led to them bringing in workers from the unemployment shelter. These workers would oftentimes not really be the greatest but there was this one worker that ended up sticking around for a while. His name was Jose and he was a man from Puerto Rico who worked around the country doing different Jobs although he hoped to work at a studio which was the reason he ended up in Los Angeles. With his mind set on that it wasn't long before he got himself fired so he could go work there, they never saw him again. Overall I think that this book has great qualities that I will use in my story, I genuinely enjoyed reading it, and I can't wait to continue reading it in the coming weeks. 

Honors Blog: Johnny Got His Gun, Chapters 10-20,      10-13-23

This book is a historical fiction story that takes place in the mind of Joe Bonham. The story starts sometime after the incident, which left Joe with his whole body destroyed and all his senses gone. Throughout the book, he fights internal battles with insanity and finds ways to hold on to his humanity while reliving parts of his past. He grew up in Shale City, Colorado, and grew up in the lower middle class. He would later move to California with his family for better economic conditions. Joe's dad would end up dying, which led to him going to war, where his life-changing incident would occur. The story is concluded after years of holding onto sanity: the very thing he was fighting for turned out to be for nothing, and he would never be set free as long as the military leaders of the world lived. He essentially wanted the world to learn from its mistakes by pretty much showing himself off where he would even communicate with people. The main characters in this book are Joe, Kareen, his old girlfriend, his parents, and the different unnamed nurses. We also hear of many different characters from his years in the workforce, like Jose the Puerto Rican, or Jody Simmons, the bakery manager. After having read the entire book, I think that this is probably one of my top 5 favorite books of all time now. This book manages to keep me excited the entire time, which hasn't happened in a very long time. I found myself really looking forward to reading the next part when I would be doing completely unrelated things. It was like binge-watching a really good TV show, and I got rewarded for it too. The part that had me the most hyped was when the mystery man would respond to Joe in Morse code since you never knew what he was going to say. All these different written components will be great in my story, and I can't wait to attempt to write something as cool as this. 

Actual Summary for Chapters 10–20

The second section of the book starts off with Joe trying to exercise his mind, which seems to be a consistent part of the story from now on. He begins to attempt to track time, and while at first this seems difficult, he finds a good method by using the world around him in the best way he can. Not long after, he realizes that he can also feel the sunrise and starts to use this as well. After one year of tracking time, he gets to the new year, and he remembers different new years throughout his life. Eventually, he learns to tell different nurses apart and begins to make observations on very small things like vibrations that help him do this. Since he is able to track time, he now imagines himself on a pleasant walk every Sunday. As Joe thinks about his location, he knows that he is probably in an English hospital and seems to remember them being pretty odd. There was a time when he was with the English when a dead body would keep resurfacing after being buried several times due to the shelling. After these two years went by, the only interesting thing to happen was a nurse falling down one time and another time he got moved rooms. One day he feels four or five people come into his room, originally hoping it was his loved ones; he starts to feel ashamed of his state and wants to hide instead. He is confused but realizes that a general is giving him a medal. He feels mad because the generals seem ignorant of his state. In his anger, he realizes that he can kind of make noise. This leads to him starting to try communicating in Morse code. He loses track of time eventually from constantly trying to send out messages. One day, a nurse masturbates Joe, and at first he is mad, but it makes him remember his first sexual partner. He thinks about all the sexual partners he's had over time, too. He ends up feeling weak and ashamed and just wants to rest. Over time, the hassle of constantly trying to send messages and having no one understand them makes him continue to lose his sanity. He thinks about slaves throughout history and comes to the conclusion that he is living a worse fate than any of them. The doctors eventually sedate him to shut him up; his visions get crazy, and he appears on a train talking to people about their fates and how they die. He feels lonely on this train and jumps off into the desert, arriving at the feet of Christ. He wakes up from this, already tapping SOS in Morse code again. There is a new nurse who seems nice and nonjudgmental. She communicates to him that it is Christmas by rubbing patterns on his chest. He remembers a lot about Christmas, and he is very happy. He even gets the nurse to understand that he is talking Morse code, and she brings in a guy who speaks it. He was expecting a lot of people to come in and want to talk to him. He simply responds to Joe “What do you want”. Joe doesn’t even actually know what he wants; he takes time to think about this. He realizes that he wants to be outside the hospital and that he can pay for this by basically selling himself to be displayed in all sorts of places. He explains this to the man who leaves the room, and he hopes that he explains this to an understandable level. The man did understand, but he returned and denied his request, saying it was against regulations. Instead, he asked who he was. He doesn't respond, as he feels super hurt. He doesn't even get a chance to speak as he is sedated, and before he goes, he asks why several times. At this point, he realizes that he won't ever be free; he is a lost cause and will always be hidden away from the world. If the people ever found out about the insanity of war, then no one would agree to it; they would join together to make the greedy, money-hungry, bad people die in those conflicts instead of all the innocent people. People of peace would unite to make the world a better place.