Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo
Published 1939 · 70,400 words · about 6 hours at an average pace
How hard is Johnny Got His Gun to read?
Johnny Got His Gun scores 60 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 48 out of 100
- Plain American vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 62 out of 100
- Unpunctuated run-on stream of consciousness.
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- Concrete memory dissolving into a mind with no senses left.
- Information density: 50 out of 100
- Light on event.
- Narrative indirection: 72 out of 100
- A narrator with no sight, hearing, limbs or speech, so nothing can be verified.
- Symbolic density: 62 out of 100
- The body and the tapping carry the meaning.
- Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
- Bitter irony about the war's language.
- Resolution withholding: 62 out of 100
- The ending refuses relief.
- Structural complexity: 62 out of 100
- Memory and present state interleaved without markers.
How Johnny Got His Gun is regarded
Johnny Got His Gun holds a literary regard score of 64 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.