Johnny Got His Gun is a very thought provoking novel, dealing with many topics and emotions. Reading it can be a very educational experience, affecting a person's opinion on isolation, war, and patriotism. Though there are many positive messages involved in Johnny Got His Gun, it should be banned from public high school's curriculum.
             One of the topics in Johnny Got His Gun is isolation. Joe Bonham, the main character, loses his arms, legs, and the front of his head, thus losing the ability of seeing, smelling, hearing, and speaking, during combat in World War I. Doctors manage to keep him alive, though he is in very bad condition. Joe is very aware, though he can not communicate with the outside world. He deals with the feeling of isolation due to the fact he is locked into his own world because of his inability to communicate with others.
             This is a very frightening thought. Joe, at one point, deals with the idea that he really does not know whether he is asleep or awake because he cannot shout out to wake himself up, or if he could, he could not hear his shouts. He could not open his eyes to see the sun rising and tell whether or not he was awake. This thought is very disturbing and the only way to quell it was that he knew, to a reasonable degree of certainty, that when he felt the nurses hands on his back, he was awake. But then he even began to question that, wondering if it is just a dream, just as the rat chewing on his legs was a dream.
             Also in his isolated world, Joe does not have the ability to perceive time. He tries methods, like counting seconds between the nurse's visits and counting seconds between his bowel movements, to rediscover it, but both of these attempts fail. He learns to recapture the concept by feeling for the heat of the sun after who he assumes to be the night nurse, comes in and checks on him. This shows him conquering a goal that originally seemed impossible. There is a very valuab...