With coming of age comes change, treading on its heels. In his novel Johnny Got His Gun, Dalton Trumbo illustrates a young man shouldering the guilt of telling his father that he would prefer to fish with a friend rather than with his father. Although the young man and his father clearly maintain a close relationship, as shown through the author’s continuous use of “they” in the initial paragraph and the son’s struggle with guilt in the last few paragraphs, the son is beginning to move on with his life and thus distance himself from his father, as shown through the limited perspective of the son in the later half of the excerpt and the carefully selected details surrounding the interactions between father and son. With the author’s continuous …show more content…
After the initial “you” to immerse the reader into the scene in line 2 — thus heightening the reader’s empathy for the events later in the passage — Trumbo introduces “him” and “his father” and immediately begins grouping these two people into a single entity of “they”. Rather than differentiating and thus dividing the two, Trumbo simply states that “they” came at this place every summer, and that “they” fished and “they” slept. By constantly referring to the son and the father in a single word, the author implies their close relationship and their tendency to look to each other for company, even before explicitly stating the latter aspect in the next paragraph. Additionally, the son regards his choice to choose another’s company over his father as “a very serious thing”, which sheds more light on how closely he’d been intertwined with his father in the summers they spent together and how new the idea of going fishing with someone else is. In the second half of the …show more content…
Whereas in the beginning the son had always been experiencing activities with his father and knows his father’s preferences for company as well as his own, this transparency between father and son falters during the conversation regarding the son’s decision to fish with someone else. The son evidently hadn’t mentioned the possibility of his friend coming over to his father earlier, as he had to introduce the idea at the beginning of the conversation. With a relationship as close as the one the son and father share, it’s odd that the father would’ve been left out of the loop, particularly as it seems that the friend’s visit must’ve been planned beforehand. This indicates that the son is beginning to form and agree to plans without his father, despite their tradition of spending the summer completely together with no one else. Although the father does give his son permission to fish with his friend and even lends him his closely treasured rod, for a while before then, “his father didn’t say a thing”. The brief silence could indicate many things — possibly feelings of betrayal or shock, in his situation — but the reader doesn’t know for sure, because the reader is limited to the son’s perspective. Despite learning much about the father and