NOTHING IS BIGGER THAN LIFE
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General presentation. Document published in 1939, just before World War II started, which is very
disparaging against wars and the sacrifice of life for ideas.
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The picture that accompanies the text is a reproduction of a WWI propaganda poster whose purpose is to
make the people who stand back and refuse to fight feel conscious, or even bad. The way it is done isn’t
particularly subtle but comes across as powerful and to the point.
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Summary: Joe Bonham was in a critical physical situation. The extract is a stream of consciousness turned
into a manifesto with specific rhetoric against wars and the idea of dying for ideas.
The study of this document can be based on three main themes
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Positioning himself. The excerpt starts with Joe Bonham referred to as “He” (line 1), but from line 13
onwards the only pronoun used is “I”. There’s a subtle shift from the focus on Joe Bonham as an exterior
character to a more personal exposition of ideas in the passage, a shift from story telling to essay or
manifesto. The opening lines of this passage help the reader penetrate into Bonham's stream of
consciousness, and especially the anti-war diatribe which follows.
The author uses paradoxes, hyperboles and other figures of speech to make the reader aware of the
exceptional situation of his character. He says things such as “I’m dead” (line 13), or that he was “the first
of all the soldiers who had died since the beginning of time” (lines 5, 6). What he tries to do is pose as an
ambassador for all the people who have died for the ideals leaders claimed were in jeopardy. Not only
does he declare that he is right and speaks on behalf of all those that have died, he also claims that,
because of his unique situation, “nobody could prove him wrong. Because nobody knew but he.” (lines 8,
9).
The reader is therefore put in a situation where he can’t dispute the “truths” the character is about to
assert because they are allegedly undisputable, and reported by someone who has the experience and
the best perspective on the matter.
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The character-author versus political and army leaders. The first reference to them is particularly
derogatory: as far as Joe is concerned they are nothing but “high-talking murdering sonsofbitches” (lines
10, 11). He holds them in low esteem. According to him they are responsible for the mass murders of
wars. They manage to convince people to war against each other thanks to their use of “words” - which
stand here for ideals - such as “democracy,” “freedom” and “independence”. They make “speeches” with
all these words, and it's no coincidence that the word "word" should be one of the most recurrent in this
passage. He calls them liar and implies they manipulate people with their use of "words". He calls for a
boycott of their speeches and their ideals, (“don’t let them kid you anymore” line 32), as they lead one to
their utter destruction for ideas that aren’t worth dying for.
It is ironical that a writer, someone who works with and manipulates words, should encourage people
not to believe in them. There is somehow a notion that words can be deceptive, one should always be
wary of them and look for the actual idea or purpose behind them.
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Debunking the myth of heroism. As far the main protagonist of this passage is concerned there is nothing
worth dying for. He mentions all the usual reasons one may have for going to war, whether it be in 1917,
when the USA joined the UK and France to defeat Austria-Hungary and Germany, or 1939: independence,
freedom, democracy, decency, honour. He ranks all these values below his own life because he says once
you’ve died, you, as a person, have nothing left: “what’s noble about lying in the ground and rotting?
What’s noble about never seeing the sunshine again? (…) When you’re dead mister it’s all over” (lines 3943). To him, life under any circumstances is better than dying for ideals. He contends that a life of
servitude (working twenty hours a day, never seeing sunlight and eating poorly, lines 16-18) would please
him better than being dead.
But is he a coward? He defends himself against such accusations saying that his “job” is to live, not to die,
and that whoever claims otherwise is a liar. Quite on the contrary, he calls all those who die for “nothing”
“idiots” (line 42). He invites all those who are requested to go and fight to turn round and “run like hell”
(line 36). In the mind of this person, living free is less important than living at all. A dead hero is to him
less than “a white maggot crawling around a dung heap” (line 45), because the hero dies for nothing and
the maggot at least, is alive. He doesn't present himself as a coward, for him it's rather a matter of
priorities: life first.
Conclusion
The rhetoric the author uses is quite particular. The passage is written as though it were a
stream of consciousness, with characteristic little care for the punctuation, and a direct address to the reader.
Some of the sentences are reminiscent of oral language, and the use of figures of speech such as repetitions and
hyperboles are typical of the manifesto, or pamphlet. They are supposed to impact strongly on the reader, who
will feel more involved.
So this passage shows how the author through his main character drew up as convincingly as he could an
indictment of war and its purposes, and also promoted the idea that there is nothing, not even the fundamental
ideals of the Western world, that he considers worth dying for.
Teacher’s note
Dalton Trumbo (1905, 1976) was a screenwriter and a novelist, and was probably the most
talented member of the Hollywood Ten, one of a group who refused to testify before the 1947 U.S. House
Committee on Un-American Activities about alleged communist involvement. He was blacklisted and in 1950
spent 11 months in prison.
Trumbo got his start in movies in 1937; by the 1940s he was one of Hollywood's highest paid writers for
work on such films as Kitty Foyle (1940), Thirty Seconds over Tokyo (1944), and Our Vines Have Tender Grapes
(1945). After his blacklisting, he wrote 30 scripts under pseudonyms. He won an Oscar for The Brave One (1956),
written under the name Robert Rich. In 1960 he received full credit for the motion-picture epics Exodus and
Spartacus, and thereafter on all subsequent scripts, and he was reinstated as a member of the Writers Guild of
America. Trumbo's vivid antiwar novel, Johnny Got His Gun, won an American Booksellers Award for 1939. He
filmed the movie of the novel himself in 1971.
The inspiration for his anti-war story Johnny Got His Gun came when he read an article about a British officer, who
was horribly disfigured during World War I. The book appeared in 1939 and won a National Book Award. In the
1960s the Spanish film director Luis Buñuel (1900-1983) planned to film the work. Trumbo was 65 when he made
with its film adaptation his own debut as a director. It won several awards at Cannes, did poorly at the box office
in the U.S., but had its greatest success in Japan.
Joe, the protagonist of the book, is a soldier of the First World War. His body has been destroyed in
battle. First he doesn’t realize his situation: "He had no legs and no arms and no eyes and no ears and no nose
and no mouth and no tongue. What a hell of a dream. It must be a dream. Of course sweet god it's a dream.
He'd have to wake up or he'd go to nuts. Nobody could live like that." Joe, a living dead man, realizes then the
extent of his disfigurement and tries desperately to find a way to communicate with his surroundings. Using
occasionally stream of consciousness, Trumbo follows Joe's thoughts, feelings, and memories as he lies helpless in
the nightmare. - The novel appeared before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. It was widely discussed among
peace group after USA declared war on Japan. Trumbo himself was not very unhappy when the book was out of
print, on the grounds that it might be used to obscure the war effort. Subsequently he gave some names of the
book's wartime fans to the FBI. However, the author himself was more interesting target for the federal
investigators. - Johnny Got His Gun remained for long an underground classic. It was republished first in 1959,
influencing the emerging generation of Beats, and such protest singers as Bob Dylan.