The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner - Randall Jarrell

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

Randall Jarrell - 1945


If anyone who was in AP Literature at NKHS is reading this, I hope you connected this to Catch-22 like I did. For those who haven't read it, Catch-22 features a character who was blown to pieces in the back of a plane (Snowden).

Back to the poem, it took me a while to actually figure out a lot of the double (quadruple?) meaning behind this poem the first time I read it. The four interpretations I got out of it were as follows:

1: Man's mother dies, he enlists in the army, he's in a battle in a plane and gets shot

2: The "mother" is the main part of the plane, and he was forced into the turret where he was shot

3: Mother dies at childbirth and man gets sent to an orphanage. From there his life is completely controlled by the state, where he spends his meaningless life until he dies.

4: The entire poem is about his birth, where "mother's sleep" is conception, "woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters" is the chaos of the real world, and (he might have died in birth, or his birth was his death) he was forced out with a steam hose (a common practice in 1945).

All of these interpretations feature one thing, this man's life was meaningless. He did nothing of importance; knew no-one of importance. No-one cared about him when he died. Even the brevity of the poem suggests the fact that he was unimportant, only worthy of five measly lines. Even through his unimportance however, we still feel sorry for his death. I think that Jarrell was trying to imply that even the most worthless people should be missed and should not be forgotten, although many are.