Catch-22

Joseph Heller
1961
Introduction
Author Biography
Plot Summary
Characters
Themes
Style
Historical Context
Critical Overview
Criticism
Source
For Further Study

Joseph Heller
1961

Introduction

Set toward the end of World War II in 1944, on an island off the coast of Italy, Joseph Heller's Catch-22 is a satirical antiwar novel. It features black humor, an unusual narrative structure, surrealism (a genre which features strange imagery and events), and a not-so-heroic protagonist who struggles to deal with the insanity of war and concludes that the only sane response to it is not to participate in it. Heller began writing Catch-22 in 1953, and a chapter from the still-in-progress novel was published in an anthology in 1955. The completed novel was published in 1961.

American army pilot John Yossarian is an antihero, that is, a protagonist lacking some traditionally heroic qualities. He is obsessed with being rotated out of active flight duty. His commander, Colonel Cathcart, keeps raising the number of missions the men in the squadron must fly before they can be rotated out. Consequently, Yossarian is desperate to find another way out of his dilemma. He asks the squadron's doctor, Doc Daneeka, to declare him unfit for duty by reason of insanity. Doc refuses, citing the mysterious Catch-22: if Yossarian asks to be let out of his duties, he must be sane. Only a crazy man would want to continue to fly missions, but the only way Daneeka can ground him, according to Catch-22, is if he asks to be grounded—which would indicate his sanity. The circular reasoning of this "catch" is the central metaphor for the absurdity of war and the military bureaucracy.

Yossarian's questions and responses to his situation show that he is indeed a sane man in an insane situation. Heller uses black humor, absurd and even surreal events, and a nonlinear narrative structure in which events are arranged by theme rather than by chronology, to drive home his point that institutions such as the military, big business, government, and religion are corrupt and individuals must find their own responses to this corruption. Heller's questioning of these respected institutions, and of war in general, foreshadowed the social protests and antiwar movements of the late 1960s, and made it one of the most popular and enduring novels of its time.

Author Biography

Joseph Heller was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1923 and grew up in Coney Island. This oceanside town had a large population of Russian Jewish immigrants, including Heller's parents, and was known for its amusement park. Heller's biting sense of humor may have been influenced by growing up in this somewhat surrealistic, carnival-like neighborhood.

After his 1941 high school graduation, Heller worked in an insurance office for a short time. The next year, 1942, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps, and in 1944, the year in which Catch-22 is set, Heller was stationed on the island of Corsica (located in the Mediterranean Sea, off the coasts of France and Italy). There he was a bombardier who flew sixty combat missions, earning an Air Medal and a Presidential Unit citation. After the war ended in 1945, Heller married Shirley Held and went to college, eventually earning a B.A. in English from New York University and an M.A. from Columbia University. He then attended Oxford University in England as a Fulbright Scholar for a year, then moved to Pennsylvania, where he taught English at Pennsylvania State University for two years. Heller then changed careers, working as an advertising copywriter from 1952 to 1961 at such popular magazines as Time, Look, and McCall's. These jobs influenced his 1974 novel Something Happened. While working as a copywriter, Heller wrote short stories and television and film screenplays, and began writing Catch-22.

The first chapter of Catch-22 was originally published in an anthology in 1955, and the entire work was published in 1961. After the novel's great success, Heller quit his copywriting job and concentrated on writing. In December 1981, he contracted a rare disease of the nervous system, which he wrote about in his book No Laughing Matter (1986) with his friend Speed Vogel. Heller has written other novels, many of which employ the plot of an individual battling against a powerful institution such as the military, government, or a corporation. These works capture Heller's basic pessimism about the power of the individual to fight society's corruption. Heller has also written a play, We Bombed in New Haven, about a group of actors who are supposed to play an Air Force squadron in an unnamed war, but who question their roles in the play. Heller also adapted Catch-22 for the stage, but critics consider the book much better than the play. To date, none of the author's writings have achieved the acclaim or success of Catch-22, which is still considered a modern classic for its black humor and absurd portrayal of war. Heller continues to write, and lives in New York.

Plot Summary

The "Catch-22"

Joseph Heller's satirical war novel Catch-22 depicts the absurdity and inhumanity of warfare through the experiences of Yossarian, a bombardier pilot stationed on the island of Pianosa (near Italy) in World War II. Heller does not tell Yossarian's story chronologically. Instead, the novel revolves around episodes in Yossarian's life (particularly the gruesome death of Snowden, a young airmnan) and employs flashbacks and digressions to jump back and forth between events.

Yossarian is terrified of flying bombing missions and attempts throughout the novel to escape this duty. He is thwarted, however, by his superiors and by "Catch-22," an ever-changing rule that keeps people subjected to authority. Early on, "Catch-22" works to keep all the men flying bombing missions, as Doc Daneeka explains to Yossarian:

"Sure, I can ground Orr [who is considered crazy].

But first he has to ask me to."

"That's all he has to do to be grounded?"

"That's all. Let him ask me."

"And then you can ground him?" Yossarian asked.

"No. Then I can't ground him."

"You mean there's a catch?"

"Sure there's a catch," Doc Daneeka replied. "Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn't really crazy."

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.

The book's final "Catch-22" is the most direct and the most sinister: "Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can't stop them from doing."

Life in the Squadron

The novel begins with Yossarian in a military hospital faking a liver ailment. He spends his time censoring letters until a talkative Texan drives him from the safety of the hospital. Upon Yossarian's return to active duty, we learn about the various men in his unit. We meet Orr, Yossarian's short, mechanically-gifted tentmate who keeps being shot down during bombing runs but wants to keep flying; McWatt, who likes to fly low and buzz Yossarian's tent in order to terrify him; Nately, a naive boy in love with a prostitute in Rome (who is only referred to as "Nately's whore") who barely notices him; Doc Daneeka, a depressed doctor continuously lamenting the loss of his lucrative practice in America; Yossarian's navigator, Aarfy, who calmly smokes a pipe and talks while Yossarian yells hysterically during bombing runs; Major Major Major Major, the pitiable squadron commander who resembles Henry Fonda and who avoids contact with everyone, leaping through his office window when people try to see him; Colonel Cathcart, a man so obsessed with promotion that he keeps increasing the men's bombing missions so that he might impress his commander, General Dreedle; and Milo Minderbinder, the unit's morally blind mess officer, a financial genius who believes only in unrestricted capitalism and who forms the M & M Enterprises syndicate, which eventually controls almost all black market commerce in the hemisphere.

Yossarian has been promoted to Captain to cover up the disaster at Ferrara, where six days passed without the squadron destroying a bridge; on the seventh day, Yossarian led a mission on a dangerous second bombing run which destroyed the target but resulted in the deaths of several men. During another incident before Yossarian's stay in the hospital, the men become panicked when they learn they must bomb Bologna, Italy, which they believe is heavily fortified. When they finally fly the Bologna mission, Yossarian pretends his plane is malfunctioning and turns back to Pianosa. Yossarian finds upon the squadron's return, however, that Bologna was a "milk run," an easy mission that involved no enemy resistance. Yossarian is the lead bombardier on the next Bologna mission. To everyone's astonishment, they encounter heavy enemy fire, which Yossarian frantically tries to avoid. Many planes are shot down. After the mission, Yossarian packs and flees to Rome on leave, where he spends his time in a brothel.

On a trip with Milo Minderbinder, Yossarian and Orr fly between countries on various trading missions of Milo's devising. They discover that Milo makes enormous profits buying and selling goods, often to and from himself. Milo reasons that the more he earns, the more the syndicate earns, and every soldier owns a share of the syndicate, though they themselves never see any money from it. Soon, Milo's fleet of planes fly everywhere, including enemy territory. For Milo, no country is an enemy because they all belong to the syndicate (except communist Russia). Milo even begins contracting with both sides to simultaneously attack and defend target sites, which leads to the death of many men. Milo does not blame himself for these deaths because he is merely a middleman, someone making a fair profit off inevitable attacks. Milo's main worry is unloading stockpiles of Egyptian cotton that he bought and now cannot sell. To alleviate his financial straits, Milo contracts with the Germans to bomb his own unit, wreaking great destruction. Milo escapes punishment when he opens the books to his military superiors and reveals the tremendous profit the syndicate realized on this deal.

Casualties of War

Soon, a series of tragedies hits the unit. McWatt, while jokingly flying low over the beach, accidently kills a member of the squad, Kid Sampson, with a propeller. McWatt flies the plane into a mountain rather than land. Colonel Cathcart responds to these deaths by raising the missions to sixty-five. Yossarian returns to Rome. Also in Rome, Nately finds the prostitute with whom he is in love and, instead of sleeping with her, allows her to sleep for eighteen hours. When she awakes, she suddenly discovers she loves him. Nately volunteers to fly more missions so he can stay near Rome. On one of these, Nately dies when another plane collides with his. When Yossarian tells Nately's whore of Nately's death, she tries to kill him. Yossarian escapes, but he must keep watch because she continually attempts to ambush him.

In response to Nately's death, Yossarian vows to fly no more missions. The men in his unit secretly tell him they hope he succeeds. Then Yossarian learns that Nately's whore and her younger sister have disappeared after the police cleared out the brothel. Yossarian goes AWOL (absent without leave) and flies to Rome, feeling remorse and guilt over his lost friends, including Orr, whose plane went down after the Bologna mission.

Yossarian begins looking for Nately's whore and her kid sister. In a passage reminiscent of a descent into the Underworld, Yossarian walks the streets and witnesses scenes of horrific brutality. He returns to his room, only to find that Aarfy has raped a woman and then thrown her out the window, killing her. Aarfy's indifference appalls Yossarian. Yet when the police arrive, they arrest Yossarian for being AWOL and apologize to Aarfy for the intrusion.

The Final Catch

On Pianosa, Colonel Korn, Cathcart's assistant, informs Yossarian that they are sending him home. Yossarian is a danger to his superiors because he has given the men hope that they, too, can stop flying missions. Yossarian's release comes with one condition: he must become his superiors' "pal" and never criticize them. Yossarian agrees to this "odious" deal. On his way out, Nately's whore attacks him, stabbing him in the side.

While sitting in the hospital, Yossarian recalls in full Snowden's death. During a mission, Snowden is wounded and Yossarian tries to treat him, discovering a large wound in Snowden's upper leg. Snowden keeps complaining that he is cold, even after Yossarian bandages the wound. Yossarian cautiously looks for another wound and removes Snowden's flak suit. Snowden's insides pour out. This moment traumatizes Yossarian, causing him to watch Snowden's funeral from a distance while sitting nude in a tree. Snowden's death has taught Yossarian a secret: "Man was matter.… The spirit gone, man is garbage.… Ripeness was all."

Major Danby from Yossarian's unit comes to see him. Yossarian tells him that he is refusing the "odious" deal, but Danby informs him that if he refuses to cooperate, Korn and Cathcart will court-martial him on a variety of charges, some real, most invented. Still, if he takes the deal, Yossarian would violate the memory of his friends and would hate himself. The squad's Chaplain Tappman rushes in and informs them that Orr was not killed when his plane crashed, but rowed to Sweden in a life boat. Yossarian realizes that all of Orr's crash landings were practice runs for this escape. Yossarian decides to escape as well, first to Rome to save Nately's whore's kid sister, then to Sweden. He is afraid but feels very good. As he leaves the hospital, Nately's whore jumps out, misses him with a knife, and he runs.

Characters

Captain Aarfy Aardvaark

Yossarian's navigator, Aardvaark pretends he can't hear Yossarian's commands and laughs when Yossarian or anyone else is in trouble, because deep down he's a sadist. Captain Aardvaark is wellmannered and respectful of the ladies on the surface, but he turns out to have a sinister side, coldly pushing a young girl out the window after raping her. What's one Italian girl's life worth, he asks Yossarian calmly. Against the hoffor of war, his question is a disturbing one, because we know that the answer is: not much.

The Chaplain

See Captain Albert Taylor Tappman

Appleby

He is as all-American as apple pie, and "everything Appleby did, he did well." Although "everyone who knew him liked him," the men tease him with the absurd charge that he has flies in his eyes, and Yossarian despises him.

Captain Black

The squadron intelligence officer, Captain Black aspires to be squadron commander, even though he is not on combat duty. Outraged by Major Major's naming as commander, he starts the Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade and refuses to allow Major Major to sign the voluntary oath. His power trip is ended by Major——de Coverley, who demands to be fed after he is asked to sign an oath.

Colonel Cargill

General Peckem's forceful yet inept troubleshooter. It's Cargill's job to get the troops excited about the lame U.S.O. shows that Peckem organizes, for example. Ruddy-complexioned, he is an aggressive man who made quite a good living in civilian life as a marketing executive, hired by firms that needed to lose money for tax purposes. He is a "self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody."

Colonel Chuck Cathcart

Cathcart is the squadron's colonel. In order to increase his chances of promotion, Cathcart keeps raising the number of missions the men must fly before getting rotated. Because he is obsessed with being promoted to general, his priorities are absurd. For example, he asks the chaplain to lead the men in prayer before missions because it might attract the attention of the Saturday Evening Post, and a nice article on Cathcart and his squadron might boost his promotion chances. He is less concerned with his pilots' safety than that they create tight bombing patterns that will make "nice photographs" to impress his superiors. Also, he promotes Yossarian to cover for Yossarian's insubordination, lest anyone blame Cathcart for Yossarian's bombing run gone awry. He is a symbol of military corruption and blind ambition.

Cathcart's self-absorption also causes him to go into business with Milo Minderbinder, who will trade the men's valuable supplies just to make a quick buck. Cathcart also builds a skeet-shooting range for the officers—not because it will help them be better soldiers, but just because he loves shooting skeet. Thus, he represents not just military corruption, but the self-absorbed American businessman. Down deep, he is insecure, and relies on Colonel Korn to help him succeed. He hates Yossarian for standing up to him.

Clevinger

One of the members of the squadron, he is not "clever" as "Clevinger" suggests, but rather slowwitted. He argues with Yossarian about Yossarian's paranoid and dark attitude and calls him crazy, which carries no weight with Doc Daneeka when Yossarian wants to be released from duty. The war is a black-and-white issue for Clevinger, who conducts educational sessions for the men and disappears on the Parma mission.

The Controller

See Doc Daneeka

Major Danby

The group operations officer whose name suggests that he is namby-pamby, meaning he's weakwilled and unable to make decisions. He's sort of like a babbling university professor, concerned with ideas and unable to act. Danby argues with Yossarian about idealism and the ethics of deserting, and then helps Yossarian to go AWOL once and for all. General Dreedle threatens to shoot him.

Doc Daneeka

Doc Daneeka, the squadron doctor, looks out for himself first and foremost. He tells Yossarian he will scratch Yossarian's back if Yossarian will scratch his, but Doc's self-interest prevents him from doing what Yossarian really wants, which is to sign papers saying Yossarian is too crazy to fly (in contrast to Doctor Stubbs, who does this for some pilots). Doc delegates many of his duties to two men named Gus and Wes. This leaves Doc free to fret over his life. He is a hypochondriac, constantly having his assistants take his temperature. He is also worried about being transferred to the Pacific, with its unusual diseases. Back home, Doc's private practice had been struggling until the war came along and all his competitors were drafted. He thrived until he was drafted himself, and he complains about having lost the business he built up. Doc earns extra money, or flight pay, by having the pilots sign documents saying that he is on flights that he isn't on. This leads the Army to assume he is dead when one of his "flights" crashes, despite his obvious living presence on base. Heller ironically describes Doc as a warm and compassionate man who is fearful and never stops feeling sorry for himself.

Major —— de Coverley

The mysterious de Coverley's first name is never given, and no one seems to know exactly what his job or rank is. An inspiring figure, he has some sort of godlike power; for instance, he is able to march into the mess hall and end Captain Black's Great Loyalty Oath Crusade with a simple command: "Gimme eat!" An older man, de Coverley has one eye, loves to play horseshoes, and has a skill for obtaining luxury apartments in recently recaptured cities. About halfway through the novel, he mysteriously goes off to Florence and is not heard from again.

Dobbs

A pilot. He flies with Huple on the Avignon mission in the number two seat and grabs the controls midair. When Colonel Cathcart raises the number of missions, Dobbs tries to assassinate him but is stopped by Yossarian.

Media Adaptations

• A film of Catch-22 was released in 1970 in the U.S., directed by Mike Nichols, screenplay by Buck Henry, starring Alan Arkin (as Yossarian), Martin Balsam, Richard Benjamin, and Art Garfunkel. Available on videotape from Paramount Pictures.
• Catch-22: A Dramatization was a one-act play based on the novel, produced in East Hampton, New York, at the John Drew Theater, July 23, 1971. Script published by Samuel French, New York, 1971.
• Catch-22, a sound recording on two cassettes (approx. 120 minutes); abridged by Sue Dawson from the novel by Joseph Heller, read by Alan Arkin. Published by Listen for Pleasure, 1985.
• Catch-22, an unsold pilot for a television comedy series, was created in 1973. Written by Hal Dresner, directed by Richard Quine, it starred Richard Dreyfuss as Yossarian.

General Dreedle

The wing commander, General Dreedle, is a solid military man who is moody but only requires that the men "do their work; beyond that, they were free to do whatever they pleased." He employs his annoying son-in-law, Colonel Moodus, to assist him. His nurse-mistress accompanies him everywhere, and he demands that people show her respect. He is constantly up against General Peckem, who is vying for Dreedle's job, but ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen helps Dreedle as much as he can until Peckem finally wins and replaces Dreedle. He is not upset when Yossarian goes naked, and he dislikes Colonels Korn and Cathcart. He seems more benevolent than the other authority figures in the novel, but his hands-off attitude allows Cathcart to keep increasing the number of missions the men must fly.

Nurse Sue Ann Duckeft

A nurse in the Pianosa hospital who takes care of Yossarian and later has an affair with him. Her name suggests that she ducks out of his embraces when she's not in the mood. A serious and practical young woman who also enjoys sensual pleasures, she ends up marrying a doctor who will make a lot of money.

Lieutenant Dunbar

A fighter-pilot captain, Dunbar is Yossarian's companion in the hospital more than once, and even trades beds with the soldier named A. Fortiori to be near his pal Yossarian. He tries to make time "go more slowly," a twist on the idea that people want time to fly, so that he doesn't have to return to combat. He is a man of ethics, so he and McWatt get upset when they're instructed to bomb a defenseless village just to block a road. After this protest, Dunbar disappears. Yossarian wonders if it has something to do with the mysterious soldier in white who appears in a hospital bed. Is there a conspiracy to shut up Dunbar? he asks himself.

Captain Flume

Flume is a public relations officer who is terrorized by his roommate Chief Halfoat's threats to slit his throat. At one point, he is so traumatized that he moves to the woods, where he lives alone, eating strawberries.

A. Fortiori

A mysterious soldier who is involved in several mix-ups over identity. A. Fortiori's name is a Latin term used in logic for a conclusion that is more reliable than the previous conclusion or reasoning it is based on.

Chief White Half oat

Halfoat is a semi-illiterate assistant intelligence officer who drinks a lot, beats up Colonel Moodus (which is just fine with Moodus's fatherin-law, General Dreedle), and makes his roommate Flume crazy. Halfoat, whose Indian-sounding name is reminiscent of "half-crocked" or "half-nuts," is indeed a little wacky, with reason. He is a half-blooded Creek Indian. Halfoat says that the government used to chase his family around Oklahoma. Inevitably, wherever they settled, oil was found, so they kept moving on, to the point where the government wouldn't even let them settle in before they started digging. He resents having had his family exploited in this way. He is set in his ways, from hating foreigners to insisting that he will die of pneumonia, which he does.

Captain Havermeyer

Havermeyer is the best bombardier in the squadron, according to Colonel Cathcart, who defends Havermeyer's upsetting habit of shooting field mice at night with a gun stolen from the dead man in Yossarian's tent. Cathcart likes Havermeyer because he flies straight toward a target, taking no evasive actions that might make his bombing less accurate and his men more safe. As a result, the men can't stand flying with him.

Hungry Joe

Another member of the squadron, Hungry Joe is a woman chaser, pretending he is a photographer (which he really was in civilian life) as a come-on. He has nightmares on nights when he doesn't have a bombing run scheduled the next day, suggesting that while bombing runs are terrifying for the men, there is some perverse comfort in the ritual of bombing. In fact, his nightmares disappear when Cathcart increases the number of missions he must fly. Despite his anxieties over the war, Hungry Joe ends up being killed by his roommate Huple's cat, which smothers him.

Huple

Huple is the underage roommate of Hungry Joe who is only fifteen years old; his cat kills Hungry Joe. Huple, a pilot, flies the Avignon mission on which Snowden is killed.

The Kid Sister

She is the twelve-year-old sister of Nately's whore. She tries to be seductive, like her big sister, but Yossarian and Nately look out for her because they see her as a child growing up too quickly.

Lieutenant Colonel Blackie Korn

Lt. Colonel Korn is Colonel Cathcart's assistant. He runs the farm he and Cathcart co-own, which Milo provided to them. His name is reminiscent both of corn, the crop, and "corny," meaning overly sentimental and cloying. Colonel Cathcart is annoyed by Blackie Korn, but he relies on him for help, since Korn is smarter and more devious. For example, Korn is the one who suggests that they give Yossarian a medal for his ill-fated bombing run over Ferrara in order to spare the military any embarrassment.

Kraft

Kraft is a young pilot who is killed on the Ferrara mission, which makes Yossarian feel terribly guilty, for he was the one who ordered a second pass on the target. Kraft only wanted to be liked. His name suggests craft, or skill, which is a joke because he is too inexperienced to have gained any skill as a pilot before he dies.

Luciana

Yossarian's Italian girlfriend whom he sees at the officers' club. Her name is derived from the Italian word for "light." She seems, at times, to know Yossarian better than he knows himself and what he will do. She laughs off his proposal of marriage.

Major Major Major Major

Major Major Major Major is the long and bony squadron commander who resembles actor Henry Fonda and is deliberately never in his office. The military insists on making him a major because they can't keep straight that Major Major Major is the man's given name, not his rank (it was a joke on his father's part). Major Major is not much of a leader, and now that he's an officer he misses being just one of the men. A timid man, he's afraid to ask Major — — de Coverley which of the two outranks the other. To relieve his boredom, he begins his own secret rebellion, signing orders as "Washington Irving" (the American novelist) and later as "John Milton" (the British author of "Paradise Lost").

McWatt

A crazy pilot who shares a tent with Clevinger and then Nately, McWatt relieves his stress by buzzing people—flying as low as possible over them—just for fun. His stunts end in his accidentally killing Kid Sampson, who is on the raft; after this McWatt intentionally crashes his plane, killing himself. While he's crazy—"the craziest combat man of them all probably, because he was perfectly sane and still did not mind the war"—he isn't a bad person. After all, he, along with Dunbar, protests when ordered to bomb a defenseless village just to block a road.

Lieutenant Milo Minderbinder

The ultimate capitalist, he is a mess officer turned businessman, trading all sorts of supplies on the black market and assuring everyone not to worry, they'll all be rich by the end of the war. He takes essential supplies from the planes but says that because everyone has a "share" in his business, it's for their own good. At one point, he makes a deal with the Germans in which he will have the Americans bomb their own base. He is Heller's symbol of capitalism at its most corrupt as well as its most powerful. As Milo's German bombing affair shows, wars come and go, but business goes on as usual.

Colonel Moodus

Moodus is General Dreedle's son-in-law and assistant. He is so annoying that Dreedle actually hires Chief Halfoat to punch him.

Mudd

Mudd is the dead man in Yossarian's tent. Actually, he's not really there. He's a pilot who died on a mission before he even checked in at Pianosa. Mudd's name is forever linked with the clutter that Yossarian's roommates find and throw out. The military insists Mudd is still alive because of their bureaucratic ineptness.

Lieutenant Nately

A squadron member, Nately is a gentle, sheltered nineteen-year-old kid from a wealthy family. He romanticizes his relationship with a whore he wants to save from prostitution and argues about the purpose of war and life with the old man in the whorehouse. He is killed, along with Dobbs, on the La Spezia run.

Nately's whore

An Italian prostitute, Nately's whore is too exhausted from her hard life to care about Nately, even though he's completely infatuated with her. She just uses him for his money, which supports her and her kid sister. However, one night after a good eighteen hours' sleep she wakes up and realizes she does love him after all. When Nately is killed, she blames Yossarian, who had broken Nately's nose but isn't really responsible for his death. Yossarian is, to her, a symbol of the war and all the pain it has caused her, so she tries to stab him to death. Her surrealistic pursuit of Yossarian, and the fact that she stabs him just when he makes his deal with Cathcart and Korn, suggest that she is a symbol for Yossarian's conscience.

The Old Man in Rome

The old man runs the whore house and lectures Nately on the meaning of war and life. His philosophy is the opposite of the young pilot's: he believes it is better to live on your knees than die on your feet. He also attacks and blinds Major — de Coverley, to everyone's astonishment.

Orr

Yossarian's roommate, Orr is a handyman who builds many projects with Yossarian. His tinkering with mechanical objects sometimes irritates Yossarian. Orr is a skilled pilot as well, but he keeps getting shot down in his plane and ending up in the ocean. He is nonchalant about this, even though no one wants to ride in his plane because they feel he has tremendously bad luck. Orr eventually crashes near Italy and while his crew rows toward shore, he rows his own raft to Sweden, where he sits out the war. Yossarian realizes this was Off's plan all along, because Orr had made mysterious comments about his crashes being "good practice." Off's name is reminiscent of "oar," a tool he uses to row to freedom, and the word "or," which reminds the reader of options and choices.

General P. P Peckem

In charge of Special Operations/Services, General Peckem is an ambitious military man given to issuing silly orders, such as insisting that the men in Italy pitch their tents with their openings facing the Washington Monument in the United States. His assistant, Colonel Cargill, helps him in his effort to take over command from General Dreedle. His name suggests "pecking order," or hierarchy, as well as a certain part of the male anatomy.

Captain Piltchard

See Captain Wren

Kid Sampson

A pilot who is killed by McWatt in a violent accident while he is standing on the raft in the ocean.

Lieutenant Scheisskopf

A pompous but ambitious officer who is promoted to general when General Peckem takes over command from General Dreedle and who eventually becomes Peckem's superior. Scheisskopf, whose name is German for "shithead," loves parades and organizes one to honor Yossarian. He also has a very sexy, promiscuous wife that the men drool over.

Snowden

The young gunner on Yossarian's B-52 who dies a gruesome death as Yossarian tries in vain to save his life. His horrible death haunts Yossarian throughout the book. A sad symbol of the sheer waste of war, Snowden is so anonymous that at his funeral no one can give a eulogy because none of the commanding officers remember much about him.

The Soldier in White

Covered from head to toe in bandages, he is supposedly Lieutenant Schmulker, but no one can tell for sure. His appearance in the hospital coincides with the disappearance of Dunbar, which makes Yossarian suspicious that he's really some sort of spy, especially since his body seems to be a slightly different size the second time he shows up.

Doctor Stubbs

Doctor Stubbs is a flight surgeon who resents having to treat wounded men only to have them fly again and expose themselves to danger. Unlike Doc Daneeka, Stubbs will help pilots get excused from duty, and he is punished by being sent to the Pacific.

Captain Albert Taylor Tappman

Everyone calls Captain Tappman "Father," but as he tells them, he's not Catholic but an Anabaptist. He's not the sort to push the point, however, being very sweet-natured and shy. He's uncomfortable around officers and hates to have to eat in the officers' mess tents, especially since he has a hard time keeping track of which tent he's supposed to eat in each day. He lives alone in his own tent, and misses his wife and child back home. He often wonders about philosophical questions, "yet they never seemed nearly as crucial to him as the question of kindness and good manners."

Because he is quiet and unassuming, sometimes people take advantage of him, but he stands up for things that are important. He asks Colonel Cathcart to stop sending the men on so many missions, and he insists that Corporal Whitcomb not send form condolence letters to the families of men killed in combat. He puts himself on the line for others, as when he claims to be the forger instead of pointing his finger at the real culprit—Yossarian.

Corporal Whitcomb

The assistant to Chaplain Tappman, he's an opportunist, looking to advance his career, and an atheist. He doesn't get along well with his boss. For example, he wants to send form letters to the families of dead soldiers, which horrifies the sensitive Chaplain. He initiates the C.I.D. investigation of the Chaplain, fingering his boss as the forger.

Ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen

A former private first class (P.F.C.), he is the mail clerk at the 27th Air Force Headquarters who tosses Peckem's silly orders into the waste basket and processes Dreedle's orders, which he thinks are written in better prose. He's constantly being promoted and then demoted, and goes AWOL (absent without leave) regularly. By taking it upon himself to forge and discard documents, he gains a lot of power over the squadron. His name suggests that he never goes away, like an evergreen that stays green in winter.

Captain Wren

Along with Captain Piltchard, one of the squadron's operations officers whose job it is to organize combat missions. Piltchard and Wren have petty ambitions, as their names suggest ("pilchard" means sardine, and a wren is a small bird).

Yo Yo Yossarian

See Captain John Yossarian

Captain John Yossarian

The central character of Catch-22 is Yossarian, a bombardier who is a captain with the 256th squadron. He is well-liked by his fellow bombardiers, and the Chaplain admires him, and even covers for him when he forges a document. Yossarian has friendships and people value his opinion (Dobbs and Milo ask him for advice, for example), but he considers himself a loner. Physically, he is big and strong and twenty-eight years old, but we learn no more than that. Yossarian also has an offbeat sense of humor, which he uses to cope with his frustration over being unable to get out of flying any more missions. He's an intelligent, complex character, honest and not given to deluding himself. He is familiar with world literature and identifies with the loners in great works of the past. Yossarian is the kind of man who is uncomfortable interacting with a woman sexually unless he is in love with her, and he cares about kids, as we can see by how he treats the kid sister of Nately's whore. He even goes AWOL (absent without leave) to find her when she's missing.

Despite his intelligence and influence, Yossarian feels powerless because his superiors keep increasing the number of missions he needs to fly before he can go home. Though he feels helpless and angry about the situation, he asks very pointed questions of the people in charge about why things are the way they are. Yossarian's questions are Heller's; they show the illogic and futility of war. His attitude toward the war and the military angers Colonel Cathcart, who resents that Yossarian, for all his powerlessness, does not cave in to the values the military promotes, such as blind obedience and unquestioning patriotism. Yossarian has a moral center that he cannot put aside for the convenience of the military, which is why he makes the squadron bomb the ocean instead of an Italian town that has no military or strategic value. He hates war and cannot ignore its horrors, and he cannot stop reliving the horror of Snowden's death. When given a final "Catch-22"—either accept a honorable discharge by lying about his refusal to fly or face a court martial—Yossarian finally discovers a way out. By following Orr to Sweden, Yossarian can finally live with his conscience. As he tells Major Danby, "I'm not running away from my responsibilities, I'm running to them."

Themes

Individual vs. Society

Joseph Heller's Catch-22 traces the efforts of Yossarian, an American bombardier in World War II, to escape participation in a war that seems meaningless. Yossarian represents the individual against a huge, corrupt institution of any sort, whether it is the army or a large corporation. The bureaucracy and rules of such large institutions, Heller suggests, often exist for their own sake, not for a good reason. Milo Minderbinder's M & M enterprises represents the corrupt corporation. In the pursuit of profits and wealth, he will trade anything, even life rafts or morphine that is needed to save the lives of the pilots, with anyone, including the enemy. The obvious question is, if we can communicate enough with the enemy to make business deals, why can't we settle our differences instead of killing each other? Negotiating peace is not the concern of Milo or his customers, however. Thus, Heller suggests that some businesspeople value money even more than human life. When Milo actually has the American pilots bomb their own base as part of a business deal with the Germans, it is perfectly logical and at the same time completely unethical. Yossarian, the sane individual, recognizes that this act is insane and evil.

The other corrupt institution in Catch-22 is, of course, the military. Yossarian is the voice of reason. He is stunned by the priorities of the army, which at best are absurd and at worst evil, such as when the military police care about his going AWOL more than Captain Aardvaark's rape and murder of the Italian girl. Many of the orders issued by the men in power serve only to secure their own positions. Yossarian is constantly questioning the foolish arbitrary military rules and decisions and even sabotages his plane's communications systems in order to abort a mission that he feels is wrong. Individual men such as Yossarian are powerless to fight the army's corruption, which is why Yossarian decides he must leave rather than be a part of it.

Sanity and Insanity

The outrageous military regulation called Catch-22 captures Heller's attitude toward sanity and insanity. It is, he suggests, impossible to exist as a sane person in an insane environment. Heller portrays life for the men in the squadron as completely crazy. They are at the mercy of ambitious commanders who care more about their own careers than the men's lives. Their sanity is challenged by military rules that make no sense but which they must blindly obey. They see ethics thrown out the window, by Milo in pursuit of profit, for example, or by the old man in Rome, who lives only for pleasure. They are asked to endanger their lives, and begin to question why this is necessary, especially when they are asked to bomb an innocent village just to block a road.

The men deal with this insanity in different ways. Yossarian fakes illness to hide out in the hospital. McWatt buzzes people with his plane. Most of the men visit the whorehouse and have meaningless sex-"banging" women, as Yossarian calls it—to distract themselves from their fears and their deep-rooted feeling that they are risking their lives for foolish reasons.

Only Orr seems to cope well, to stay sane amid the madness, and the reader later learns it is because he has been focused on a plan to escape, and has even been practicing that escape. When Yossarian realizes what Orr has been doing, he makes the choice to escape as well. Despite the tremendous odds against the success of Yossarian's plan, Heller suggests it is not a crazy but a sane response to an insane situation over which Yossarian has no control.

Topics for Further Study

• Research the antiwar movements of the 1950s and 1960s. Compare the reasoning antiwar activists presented for their opposition to war with the ideas presented in Catch-22.
• Discuss the themes of greed and corruption in the business world in Catch-22. Find a real-life case of a disaster caused by corporate greed and compare it to Milo Minderbinder's actions.
• Research the military justice system. Investigate under what circumstances a soldier may be charged with disobeying orders or desertion and what the penalties are. Then analyze how Yossarian's actions in Catch-22 would have been charged and penalized.
• Discuss how Heller uses language itself to show that war is absurd. Use examples from several characters and be sure to take quotes from the text to support your analysis.

Heroes and Heroism

The protagonist of a novel is generally called the hero because he or she usually has heroic, admirable qualities. An antihero, however, is someone who does not have heroic qualities such as courage and selflessness, but is still admirable because he has qualities that may mean just as much to the reader. Yossarian is certainly not courageous: he will do anything to get out of combat, even fake illness. He's not selfless; in fact, he's obsessed with saving himself from danger. Note that Heller chose as his setting World War II, an unambiguously "good" war to most Americans. Yossarian is rebelling against fighting a just war against a very evil empire, Nazi Germany. In theory, the reader should not like or identify with such a protagonist.

However, the war that we see in the book is not the Allies versus the Axis powers but the individual against the bureaucracy. Again and again, the military and business bureaucracies steal the dignity and hope of the men in Yossarian's squadron. The reader can understand Yossarian's point of view and empathize with him because he can never reach the number of missions he must fly before he goes home; the number will constantly be bumped up—not because that is what is necessary to stop the enemy, but because more missions will help the individual ambitions of one man gunning for a promotion. The reader sees Yossarian helpless against an absurd militaristic bureaucracy, held hostage and even physically endangered by the mercenary, money-grubbing business dealings of M & M Enterprises. The reader comes to like and respect Yossarian for standing up to the absurdity, refusing the dishonesty of betraying his fellow men by taking Cathcart and Korn up on their offer (he'll be discharged if he lies and tells people he never refused to fly or challenged his superiors). Under the circumstances, Yossarian's character flaws are no match for his decency and honesty, traits which seem utterly absent in the military.

Absurdity Language and Meaning

While the purpose of language is to communicate, Heller shows that corrupt people and institutions misuse language in order to confuse and manipulate others and avoid responsibility. The characters' bizarre and illogical uses of language help create an atmosphere of absurdity—a state in which unreal, irrational things happen every day. In the beginning of the book, readers may be cOrrused by the seemingly illogical discussions of flies in Appleby's eyes or Orr's story of stuffing crab apples or horse chestnuts in his cheeks to make them rosy, but soon it's clear that the men's unorthodox use of language mirrors that of their commanding officers'. Colonel Cargill tries to instill pride in the men, saying, "You're American officers. The officers of no other army in the world can make that statement." This self-evident statement has no real meaning. Captain Black says signing his loyalty oath is voluntary, but anyone who does not sign will be starved to death. And Major Major tells his assistant "I don't want anyone to come in to see me while I'm here." While the sentence is grammatical, it makes no sense. It is just a round-about way of saying he doesn't want to see anyone, ever, which of course is absurd. He has to talk to people to do his job. Circular logic and redefining words, Heller shows, allows people to avoid the reality of situations, or to twist reality to suit their purposes. No wonder that when asked if Appleby has flies in his eyes, Yossarian thinks this impossibility might be true because "it made as much sense as anything else."

Style

Setting

Catch-22 is set on an army air force base on the island of Pianosa off the coast of Italy in 1944, toward the end of World War II. The majority of the action takes place on the base itself, in the B-52 bomber planes as they go on raids, and in the local whorehouse, where the men relax; there are also flashbacks to training camps in America and some scenes in Italy. The island is real, but there was not a base on it in WWII. Note that the 256th is an army squadron of pilots; the army and navy both had air forces during the war but a separate U.S. Air Force was not created until 1947.

Point of View

The story is told in third person. Sometimes the narrative is omniscient ("all-knowing"), meaning that readers can see the large picture and everything that goes on. Sometimes, however, the narrator's vision is somewhat limited: we see things as if through a particular character's eyes. For example, the first several chapters are really from the point of view of Yossarian, but then in chapter nine we pull back and see the larger picture. This switching from limited to omniscient narration allows Heller to focus on the big picture or just one character.

Structure

Catch-22 is not a linear novel in which events follow each other chronologically. Instead, to underscore his points, Heller has the narrative jump around in time, using flashbacks and déjàa vu —a French term for repetition meaning "already seen." This allows the author to juxtapose scenes that have a strong connection to each other thematically. The reader can follow the chronological chain of events by noting the references to Cathcart's continual raising of the number of missions the men must fly; the growth of M & M enterprises, which becomes increasingly powerful over time; and the revelations about the gruesome death of the young pilot named Snowden, a singular event that serves as an epiphany for Yossarian, that is, a moment that makes him "see the light." After he finally relives the event in full, he is determined to escape the insanity of war rather than try to find a way to cope with it.

The scrambling of scenes serves a second purpose as well: to reflect the state of mind of a combat pilot. Life in the military is in certain ways controlled and orderly, even dull, but it is intermingled with the sheer terror of death, which is completely unpredictable. Heller wants the reader to understand that time itself has a different meaning for someone in this situation, that what is important is not each day's separate events but the themes that are apparent in so many different situations at different times: the absurdity of bureaucracy, the callousness of ambitious men, the difference between reality and appearance.

Irony, Satire, and Black Humor

Writers often combine irony, satire, and black humor to express their themes and ideas, because the three techniques work together well. Heller uses all of these techniques liberally in Catch-22. One definition of irony is the use of words to express something other than their literal meaning—or even the opposite of their meaning. Thus, naming a pilot who is inexperienced at his craft "Kraft" is an ironic choice. Satire is the holding up of human vices and follies to ridicule or scorn through wit and sarcasm. Catch-22 is a social satire, ridiculing targets such as the military (an example would be Scheisskopf's absurd obsession with military parades) and big business (witness the success of Milo's M & M Enterprises: countries that are actually at war with each other hypocritically do business with each other as well). Satire usually involves extremes, and certainly much of the absurdity in Catch-22 is due to extreme examples of bureaucracy run amok, or capitalism at its most corrupt. The absurdity Heller creates is also funny, although not in a lighthearted way. Heller uses black humor, that is, humor with a dark tone to it, or an edge. Joking about death, for example, is a form of black humor. Thus, when Heller makes the army unable to recognize that Mudd is dead and Doc is alive (because they have more faith in the military's records than in the reality of one dead and one live body), it is black humor.

Allusion

Allusions are subtle references authors make to other books or events that are relevant to the point at hand, or to other events within the book itself. Throughout Catch-22, Joseph Heller makes references to literature, the Bible, and other writings and historical events. So, for example, when Yossarian censors letters in an absurdly nonsensical way, he signs off on them as "Washington Irving" or "Irving Washington." Washington Irving, a nineteenth-century novelist and essayist, often used black humor, and created the famous character Rip Van Winkle, who was, like Yossarian, an antihero (a protagonist whose admirable qualities are not the usual ones). This allusion points out to the reader that Yossarian identifies with the antihero Van Winkle and with Irving's black humor.

Allusion can also achieve a comic effect. At one point, Heller turns around Shakespeare's classic proclamation that "some men are born to greatness" and "some men have greatness thrust upon them" by writing that Major Major Major was "born to mediocrity" and had "mediocrity thrust upon him." The reader, remembering the loftiness of the original quote and its source, is meant to see the humor in changing "greatness" to "mediocrity," as if mediocrity, like greatness, could be stunningly admirable and spoken of with the utmost respect.

Finally, allusions to events within the novel itself remind readers of thematic connections between the events. Heller makes many such allusions to drive home his themes.

Historical Context

Italy in World War

Catch-22 takes place on an American Army Air Force base on an island off the coast of Italy. Italy had been drawn into World War II by Benito Mussolini, a former Socialist who had come to power in 1925. His fascist government, marked by strict government control of labor and industry, ended civil unrest in the country but limited the rights of its citizens. Mussolini was constantly engaged in military campaigns, conquering Ethiopia in 1936, for example, and that same year he signed an agreement with Nazi Germany's Adolf Hitler to cooperate on a mutually beneficial foreign policy. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Great Britain and France declared war, and Italy officially joined Germany in the alliance of Axis Powers in 1940.

Italy had neither the economic or strategic resources to succeed for long, and by mid-1943 the Allied Forces of the United States and Great Britain had begun occupying Italian territory. By this time, Mussolini was in political trouble, and he was exiled and eventually executed in 1945. A new government of Italian businessmen and workers signed an armistice with the Allies, and in October 1943 declared war on Germany. The Germans, however, still controlled the northern part of the country and Italy now found itself divided. By the time that Yossarian and his combat crew entered the war, Italy had largely withdrawn from the war and Germany still occupied portions of the country. Although the war with Germany ended on May 7, 1945, the Allies would continue to occupy Italy until a peace treaty with the country was finally signed in 1947.

Compare & Contrast

• 1940s: The U.S. invades Normandy, France, in June, 1944, while massively bombing Japan. Two atom bombs dropped on Japan in August will lead to Japan's surrender. The war ends in 1945.

  1960s: In November 1961, President Kennedy begins increasing the number of American advisers in Vietnam, which will grow from 1,000 to 16,000 over the next two years. Two U.S. Army helicopter companies, the first direct American military support of South Vietnam, arrive in Saigon. In 1965, President Johnson will begin sending combat troops, without getting the approval of Congress.

  Today: Recent police actions, such as Operation Desert Storm in 1991 and the 1983 invasion of Grenada (an island in the Caribbean), have been publicly questioned by Americans even as these actions were taking place. Congress must now vote on such actions.

• 1940s: Jim Crow laws in the South are the most obvious evidence that blacks are expected to keep their distance from whites. Throughout the country, African Americans have fewer educational and economic opportunities.

  1960s: The Civil Rights movement is in full swing, as African Americans forced the federal government to pass the Civil Rights Act in 1957. Movement leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., advocate peaceful civil disobedience, but others, such as Malcolm X and the Black Panthers, suggest that armed resistance against white oppression should not be ruled out.

  Today: Racism continues to afflict America, as the different responses between African Americans and whites to the 0. J. Simpson trial pointed out. African Americans still have higher rates of infant mortality, joblessness, and poverty than whites do.

• 1940s: While many men are off at war, women work as "Rosie the Riveters," taking jobs in the war industry. For many women, this is the first time they have entered the work force and eamed their own money.

  1960s: Betty Friedan publishes The Feminine Mystique in 1963, launching the modern-day feminist movement. The movement focuses on individual women at first, and only begins to be a major political force toward the end of the Vietnam War in the early 1970s.

  Today: The term "feminism" has become so loaded with contradictory meanings that many women who are technically feminists (anyone who believes in political, social, and economic equality of the sexes) avoid it. Women make up 46% of the work force but still only make 75 cents for every dollar men eam.

U.S. War Involvement

Italian territory occupied by Allied forces provided good locations for air force divisions, which played a key strategic role during World War II. The United States Army Air Force employed two types of military bombers: the smaller fighter bombers, and the strategic bombers, which were large, long-range planes that could attack targets deep in enemy territory. They generally held between two and eight people. In the novel, Yossarian flies aboard a B-25, one model of this type of strategic bomber. The men on board these planes had distinct duties. Seated in the nose of the plane were the bombardier and the navigator. While the navigator directed the plane toward its destined target, the bombardier timed the release of the plane's bombs to most effectively destroy that target. These two men had to work closely with each other to facilitate the exchange of inflight information. Above and behind the nose was the pilot's compartment. Here the pilot and copilot steered the plane toward its destination and through any enemy fire, or "flak." The body of the plane held the bomb bay and the radio compartment. Radio operators generally worked as communication men as well as gunners. Also on the planes were men who worked as aerial engineer gunners and armorer gunners, whose mechanical backgrounds would come into play when planes suffered damage. Altogether, though each of them held a different post and their ranks varied, the crew worked as a unit each time its members entered the sky.

Catch-22 is set at the end of World War II, the so-called "good war" because almost all Americans supported it. Any reluctance to join the Allies in their battle against Germany's Adolf Hitler and the Axis powers was erased in 1941 when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Having already been through a world war, however, Americans realized that wars rarely settled political grievances; they were becoming more cynical about war in general. The Korean War (technically only a "police action" that lasted from 1950 to 1953) left Americans wary about the futility of entering "limited" wars in other countries. The Vietnam War, which America began to enter in the late 1950s, was not yet unpopular in 1961, but Americans after the Korean War would soon embrace Heller's absurdist, antiwar message as strongly as they did his satire of Cold War America.

The Cold War

While Catch-22 takes place in 1944, in it Heller makes frequent allusions to events in America in the 1950s, even using anachronisms (things out of time) such as computers and helicopters so that people would think of the Korean War as well as WWII. Heller felt that the Cold War era, far from being an ideal, peaceful time, was filled with tension and paranoia. Allusions to the 1950s abound: the C.I.D. (a representative of the CIA or FBI) accuses the Chaplain of hiding documents in a plum tomato stolen from Cathcart's office. Absurd though it sounds, Heller was drawing upon the story of real-life state department official Alger Hiss, who was accused of being a communist and of hiding documents in a hollowed-out pumpkin. Captain Black starts a loyalty oath "crusade," and Chief Halfoat makes references to being "red"— talking about communism, not skin color. When Milo claims "what's good for the syndicate is good for the country," he is echoing a member of President Eisenhower's cabinet, who said, "what's good for General Motors is good for the country." These are ideas that Americans would come to question in the 1960s.

The Zeitgeist of the 1960s

Readers of Catch-22 responded to the novel's celebration of the individual and its satire of institutions such as the government, the military, and business corporations. Yossarian stands up against absurd and corrupt authority, dismisses the shallow values of ambition and materialism, recognizes the hypocrisy of the army, and bravely makes up his own mind about how to respond to a demoralizing situation. He wrests control of it, and overcomes his powerlessness.

These themes would become a crucial part of the zeitgeist, or spirit of the age, in the 1960s. American youth were questioning the idea that American institutions and politicians were completely trustworthy and free from corruption. The communist witch-hunts of the 1950s led by Senator Eugene McCarthy, in which people were hounded and blacklisted from their professions because they were suspected communists, had made many Americans rethink their blind trust in politicians and the government. This distrust would build to a peak in the early 1970s, when the Watergate scandal of the Nixon administration eroded the public's faith in the presidency. Meanwhile, in the 1960s, the Vietnam War took increasingly more American lives and became even more violent and bloody. People started to question why politicians had led the country into it initially, and why they were still there, especially since there was no end in sight. Had the U.S. become involved for idealistic reasons, or because of business deals between the country and Vietnam? Why was there still fighting if there did not seem to be any progress? Could it be that politicians just didn't want to admit they had been wrong, and were letting young men die in Vietnam rather than being honest about the situation? As more Americans asked these difficult and important questions, they began to rethink other issues as well. They stopped taking for granted that the status quo (the way things are) was the best that it could be.

Racism and Sexism

Until the late 1950s and early 1960s, few white Americans gave any thought to the plight of black Americans. "Negroes" were, after all, a minority, and segregation kept them in different neighborhoods, different schools, and in the South, even in different restaurants, bus seats, and bathrooms. However, black Americans were beginning to take action against the treatment they received. Their "separate but equal" schools were inferior to white students' schools. A 1954 Supreme Court ruling, Brown vs. the Board of Education, forced school integration, and helped launch the Civil Rights movement. The movement, which would be led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., began to gather power, inspiring the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which created the Civil Rights Commission and spelled out penalties for voting rights violations, and the Voter's Rights Act of 1965, which guaranteed black Americans access to the voting booths. Other black leaders and organizations, from Malcolm X to the Black Panthers, demanded respect and power for their people. Heller alludes to the growing civil rights movement when he has Colonel Cathcart claim that he would never let his sister marry an enlisted man—in other words, an inferior. This summed up many white American's attitude towards blacks: they would claim to have many Negro friends, but in the end, they wouldn't want a relative to actually marry a black person.

As the Civil Rights movement gained momentum, the feminist movement was just beginning. In 1963 journalist Betty Friedan published a best-selling book called The Feminine Mystique, which pointed out that housewives were on the whole an unhappy lot, unfulfilled because their lives were built around men's. The book launched an entire movement, as women began questioning what they needed and wanted for themselves as individuals outside of their relationships to others. In 1961, Heller's portrayal of military women, prostitutes, and nurses seemed funny, honest, and deadon. It would be several years before most people would notice that the female characters in Catch-22>are mostly shallow, portrayed as sex-starved and preoccupied with men.

Critical Overview

When a chapter of Catch-22 was first published as a novel-in-progress in 1955, Joseph Heller got several letters of encouragement from editors. Then, when the finished book was published in 1961, Orville Prescott of the New York Times described it as "a dazzling performance that will outrage nearly as many readers as it delights." Half the reviews were positive, but the other half were negative, and some were downright scathing. New York Times Book Review contributor Richard G. Stem said the novel "gasps for want of craft and sensibility," "is repetitious and monotonous," "is an emotional hodgepodge" and certainly no novel, and, finally, that it "fails." The structure was problematic for some: acclaimed author Norman Mailer said in Esquire: "One could take out a hundred pages anywhere from middle … and not even the author could be certain they were gone." New Yorker critic Whitney Balliett said it "doesn't even seem to have been written; instead, it gives the impression of having been shouted onto paper," and that "what remains is a debris of sour jokes." Further, the critic said Heller "wallows in his own laughter and finally drowns in it."

The last laugh was on these reviewers, however, because although the book did not win any prizes or appear on any best-seller lists, it soon became an underground hit and sold extremely well in paperback. More and more critics began to see in it what readers saw. The book had quickly become a favorite of the counterculture because of its antiauthoritarian and antiwar attitude. As Eliot Fremont-Smith said in the Village Voice (New York City's progressive counterculture newspaper), "[Catch-22] came when we still cherished nice notions about WWII. Demolishing these, it released an irreverence that had, until then, dared not speak its name." While Catch-22 was set in World War II, its message was very contemporary. As some critics pointed out, in Catch-22 the real enemy is bureaucracy, and Vietnam was a war in which the real enemy seemed to be not the Viet Cong but the U.S. military and big business, which dehumanize people. Carol Pearson wrote in the CEA Critic that the book captures how people "react to meaninglessness by renouncing their humanity, becoming cogs in the machine. With no logical explanation to make suffering and death meaningful and acceptable, people renounce their power to think and retreat to a simpleminded respect for law and accepted 'truth." Jean E. Kennard wrote in Mosaic, "Heller's horrifying vision of service life in World War II is merely an illustration of the human condition itself."

Raymond M. Olderman wrote in Beyond the Waste Land that the key scene of the novel is when the M.P.s arrest Yossarian for being AWOL while they overlook the murdered young Italian girl lying in the street. This incident, Olderman said, symbolizes "much of the entire novel's warning—that in place of the humane … we find the thunder of the marching boot, the destruction of the human, arrested by the growth of the military-economic institution." This institution is personified by Milo Minderbinder, the wheeling and dealing businessman who values money and business deals above all else. In the Canadian Review of American Studies, reviewer Mike Frank said that "for Milo, contract, and the entire economic structure and ethical system it embodies and represents, is more sacred than human life." After all, Milo even trades away the men's life rafts and makes a deal with the Germans to bomb the Americans' own base.

Critics pointed out that Yossarian's sense of powerlessness in the face of large institutions such as the military, the government, and big business are experienced by people everywhere. Yossarian became a timeless symbol of rebellion and reason, and his decision to take the moral high ground and defect despite the odds against him was embraced by many. Olderman noted that Yossarian's choice in the end was more admirable than it appears on the surface. As he points out, Yossarian's choices are that "He can be food for the cannon; he can make a deal with the system; or he can depart, deserting not the war with its implications of preserving political freedom, but abandoning a waste land, a dehumanized, inverted, military-economic machine."

Critics also noticed Heller's distinctive use of language. Kennard of Mosaic wrote that in the novel, "Reason and language, man's tools for discovering the meaning of his existence and describing his world, are useless." Language, Heller reveals, can be easily manipulated to the point where it doesn't reflect reality but instead has the power to "divest itself from any necessity of reference, to function as a totally autonomous medium with its own perfect system and logic," as Marcus K. Billson II pointed out in the Arizona Quarterly. Of course, the most memorable misuse of language is in the circular logic of the fictional military rule called "catch-22."

While Heller's novel is humorous, he said he wanted the reader to be ashamed that he was amused and to see the tragedy. Morris Dickstein in the Partisan Review pointed out that Milo's antics, which are funny at first, "become increasingly somber, ugly and deadly—like so much else in the book—that we readers become implicated in our own earlier laughter." Nelson Algren in the Nation also saw the more serious side of the novel: "Below its hilarity, so wild that it hurts, Catch-22 is the strongest repudiation of our civilization, in fiction, to come out of World War II."

Today, more than ten million copies of the book have been sold, and Catch-22 is considered a classic novel. As Richard Locke said in the New York Times Book Review, "It is probably the finest novel published since World War II … the great representative document of our era, linking high and low culture." Indeed, the term "catch-22" has entered the language itself and can be found in many dictionaries.

Criticism

Darren Felty

Felty is a visiting instructor at the College of Charleston. In the following essay, he discusses how Catch-22 explores larger issues of social order and individual responsibility within the context of a war novel.

As most critics recognize, Catch-22 offers more than a critique of World War II, despite its focus on the destructiveness of warfare. Instead, Joseph Heller employs this setting to comment upon the condition of mid-century American life. His satire targets not just the military but all regimental institutions that treat individuals as cogs in a machine. His central character, Yossarian, recognizes the insanity of social institutions that devalue human life and tries to rebel against them, first in minor ways and finally through outright rejection of them. Yet Yossarian is not, as some have contended, an immoral or non-idealistic man. He is a man who responds to human suffering, unlike characters such as Colonel Cathcart and Milo Minderbinder, who ignore the human consequences of their actions. Yossarian's perceptions conflict with most everyone else's in the book. Thus, his encounters with people inevitably lead to mutual misunderstandings, to Yossarian labelling everyone else crazy, and to a sense of pervasive lunacy. This lack of rationality creates wild comedy in the novel, but, ultimately, it drives the book toward tragedy.

Yossarian sees the conflicts of the war in purely personal terms. To him, his enemies, which include his superior officers, are trying to murder him. Those who believe in the war cannot comprehend his reduction of its conflicts to personal assaults. The young airman Clevinger, for instance, refuses to accept Yossarian's views that people are trying to kill him:

"No one's trying to kill you," Clevinger cried.

"Then why are they shooting at me?" Yossarian asked.

"They're shooting at everyone," Clevinger answered.

"They're trying to kill everyone."

"And what difference does that makeT'

Clevinger was already on the way, half out of his chair with emotion, his eyes moist and his lips quivering and pale.… There were many principles in which Clevinger believed passionately. He was crazy.

Yossarian reduces the war to its barest elements and refuses to see himself as one component in a wider cause, which befuddles the "principled," patriotic Clevinger. Yet Yossarian does not reject the aims of the war (stopping the spread of Nazism); he reacts the way he does because he sees that the aims have been perverted. The men no longer serve a cause; they serve the insane whims of their superiors.

Men with authority in the novel do not focus on a common goal (which Clevinger believes), nor do they recognize the humanity of those they command. They value only the power they hold in the military (or the medical, religious, or commercial professions). To gain more power, these men corrupt and exploit the founding principles of the institutions they serve. For instance, instead of fighting to stop totalitarian regimes that would eliminate freedom, the military itself has imposed totalitarian rule. To maintain it, they utilize "Catch-22," a rule that they can change to fit their needs and that keeps the men trapped in their current roles. "Catch-22" grows more sinister as the novel progresses. It begins as a comic absurdity reflecting the essential powerlessness of those in the squadron since it keeps them flying the additional missions Colonel Cathcart orders:

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr [who wants to keep flying] was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions.

When Yossarian attempts to go over Colonel Cathcart's head to division headquarters, the rule simplifies further. Despite the fact that he has flown the number of missions needed to complete his tour of duty, as specified by Cathcart's superiors, he still must obey Cathcart because "Catch-22" "says you've always got to do what your commanding officer tells you to." The soldiers, who see no altemative to these rules, accept them. Thus, everyone (except Yossarian and a scant few others) is insane because they ascribe to insane principles. They see not reality but the "reality" constructed by those who manipulate them. And they die, not to stop the Germans, but to fulfill the ambitions of their superiors and to maintain the institutions that abuse them.

What Do I Read Next?

• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) by Ken Kesey is another novel about a man caught in an insane institution, in this case literally. Randall Patrick McMurphy was sent to an insane asylum as part of a plea bargain arrangement, and must fight to retain his sanity and sense of himself when he is confornted with the brutal authoritarian figure of Big Nurse, who runs the ward.
• Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) by Kurt Vonnegut is another semi-autobiographical, satirical novel that uses a nonlinear structure to make its points about the horror and absurdity of war. The main action is set during the Allied bombing of Dresden, Gertnany, in World War II, and the main character, Billy Pilgrim, like Yossarian, is a bombardier.
• Going after Cacciato (1979) is an antiwar novel by Tim O'Brien, set during the Vietnam War. In it, the main character, Cacciato, like Yossarian, tries to escape the war, in this case Vietnam, and arrive in a safe place, Paris. O'Brien, like Heller, uses black humor and surrealism to bring out his themes.
• V. (1963) by Thomas Pynchon is a novel about a mysterious woman who shows up at key points in European history. Pynchon uses black humor to point out the flaws in American values in the 1950s. He also shows, like Heller, that language can serve to confuse people rather than clearly communicate. Also, like Catch-22, V. has an unusual narrative structure that jumbles chronology.
• The Best of Abbie Hoffman: Selections from "Revolution for the Hell of It," "Woodstock Nation, " "Steal This Book," and New Writings (1990) by Abbie Hoffman, edited by Daniel Simon. Abbie Hoffman was a highly influential political activist, radical, and counterculture hero of the 1960s who, like Joseph Heller, used humor to make important points about American society and values, as well as to criticize the war and big business. He believed that "street (guerilla) theater" got people's attention in the television age, so he arranged stunts such as dropping dollar bills on the Stock Exchange and threatening to have people meditate en masse, causing the Pentagon to levitate. He explained his ideas in several nOrriction books, excerpted in this collection.
• M*A*S*H*, like Catch-22, was a satirical movie about the insanity of war, released in 1970 in the U.S., directed by Robert Altman, screenplay by Ring Lardner, Jr., starring Donald Sutherland, Elliot Gould, Sally Kellerman, and Robert Duvall. Available on video from 20th Century-Fox.

Of even wider significance than military authoritarianism, however, is Milo Minderbinder's capitalistic fervor and the excesses he commits in its name. Through Milo, Heller condemns the unscrupulous expansion of commercial interests that exploit people for profit or even reduce them to the status of commodities. Milo himself acts not out maliciousness, but out of blindness. He recognizes only the right to profit, which forms his very morality. Milo embodies an American ideal. He is an individualist who believes in initiative, hard work, and opportunism, and these principles make him rich. But he is also the ultimate organization man. He forms the M & M Enterprises syndicate on the premise that every man owns a share. Thus, by supposedly incorporating everyone into his ventures, he monopolizes the black market and ensures the cooperation of those he manipulates. His vision proves destructive, however, because it excludes any notion of humanity. For instance, he contracts with the Allies and the Germans to both bomb and defend a bridge at Orvieto, and he even bombs his own squadron to make money to offset his losses in the Egyptian cotton market. When Yossarian criticizes him for his actions at Orvieto, Milo replies, "Look, I didn't start this war.… I'm just trying to put it on a business-like basis. Is anything wrong with that? You know, a thousand dollars ain't such a bad price for a medium bomber and a crew." Here, Milo unwittingly reveals his purely economic intelligence, which equates men with machinery. His agreements also betray his notions of loyalty: neither the Allies nor the Germans are his enemies because they both belong to the syndicate. He remains loyal only to his economic empire, in which the sanctity of a contract means more than the sanctity of life.

The catastrophic results of the callous misuse of power in the novel find their most wrenching expression in "The Eternal City" chapter. This chapter loses all vestiges of comedy and becomes a nightmare vision of brutality run amuck. Yossarian wanders through Rome encountering a succession of horrors and thinks, "Mobs with clubs were in control everywhere." He also learns the essence of "Catch-22": "Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can't stop them from doing." Power is all. And the power to control belief is even more valuable than the power to kill, since, as Yossarian realizes, "Catch-22" works because people believe that it exists when it actually does not. Like Milo Minderbinder's capitalistic rationalizations, it serves to "bind" people's minds. Therefore, they accept the abuses heaped upon them and the world turns absurd.

In such a world, Colonel Cathcart can keep raising missions and Milo can brazenly bomb his own squadron. Hence, the restraints governing commerce and the military have completely collapsed. Survival becomes all that matters, and one must look to save himself because the institutions that supposedly support him actually look to cannibalize him. Yossarian learns this lesson most forcefully through the death of Snowden, an event that haunts him throughout the book but which he only fully understands at the novel's end. When Snowden's insides spill out as Yossarian is trying to save him, Yossarian discovers a secret: "Man was matter.… Bury him and he'll rot like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage." He graphically encounters human vulnerability and comprehends the essential need to understand another's humanity, to see his "spirit," not to view him as only an expendable object.

Thus, the more Yossarian understands the abuses of those who wield power, and the more he sees people suffer because of these abuses, the more stubborn he becomes in his refusal to participate in the war. When he finally decides to desert from the military altogether, he does not run from the defense of principles of freedom, individuality, and justice. He, like his dead comrades, defended those ideals. His only recourses besides desertion are imprisonment or accepting Cathcart and Korn's deal to become their "pal." Both options ultimately defend Cathcart and Korn's actions and spur others to continue fighting. If imprisoned, Yossarian implicitly validates his superiors' "right" to punish him. If he accepts their deal, he would advocate murder, since men are now dying not for the cause but to help maintain their superiors' hold on authority. As Victor J. Milne contends, Yossarian's flight affirms "that an individual has no right to submit to injustice when his action will help to maintain an unjust system." Instead, Yossarian tries to flee the system itself. However futile this effort, he refuses to sanction corrupt officials and become, like them, an exploiter of others for personal gain, thereby preserving his own moral character.

Source: Darren Felty, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale 1997.

Louis Hasley

In the following essay, Hasley explores how Heller uses a dramatic contrast between humorous and harrowing incidents to heighten the horror of the novel

A book that was widely acclaimed a classic upon its appearance and that has suffered no loss of critical esteem deserves many critical examinations. Now, more than ten years after its first publication in 1961, Joseph Heller's Catch-22 may justify another attempt to fix certain qualities in it more precisely than has yet been done. My special concern here is the pattern of dramatic tension between the preposterous events of the story and the built-in dimension of laughter. It is part of the pattern that the laughter, intermittent and trailing away just before the end, contributes to a catharsis in which the grimness of war provides the dominant memory.

It is part of the book's greatness that its hilarious force comes so near to a stand-off with the grimness. Heller has achieved his declared purpose, mentioned elsewhere, not to use humor as a goal, but as a means to an end. "The ultimate effect is not frivolity but bitter pessimism," he said (Time, Mar. 4, 1966). And yet the alternating play of humor and horror creates a dramatic tension throughout that allows the book to be labeled as a classic both of humor and of war. It is not "a comic war novel" despite the fact that comedy and war are held more or less in solution, for the war is not comic but horrible—this we are not allowed to forget. The laughter repeatedly breaks through the tight net of frustration in which the characters struggle only to sink back as the net repairs itself and holds the reader prisoned in its outrageous bonds.

Right here the unskillful reader may protest that Catch-22 is a comic war novel. For who could believe that war is conducted as the novel pictures it—realism blandly ignored, motivations distorted beyond recognition, plausibility constantly violated. Even conceding that war is not peace, that the conditions of any war are abnormal, could any serious work stray so far from what we know of human character?

The answer lies in an artistic strategy relating to the thesis of the novel, which, put simply, is this: War is irrational; and the representative things that happen in war are likewise irrational, including man's behavior in war. This thesis is an underlying assumption, a donnée, illustrated not documentarily but imaginatively throughout the book. It is, in terms of the book, unarguable—you take it or leave it—for the author has seen to it that all the evidence favors his thesis. What he asks, and it is everything, is that his readers accept the credibility of his characters and their actions, if not at face value, then as wild, ingratiating exaggeration that nevertheless carries the indestructible truth that war is irrational.

It would be an uncritical reader indeed who would accept at face value the greater part of what is related in this hilarious, harrowing book. For the absurd, the ridiculous, the ludicrous, are pyramided, chapter after chapter, through the lengthy book's entire 463 pages.

Starting with the opening page in which Captain Yossarian, the book's non-hero, is goldbricking in a hospital bed and censoring letters which he as censoring officer signs "Washington Irving" and sometimes with variant whimsicality "Irving Washington," to the last page in which "Nately's whore" makes a final but unsuccessful attempt to stab Yossarian because he had told her of Nately's death—through all this the predominance of the outre in events and behavior is unchallenged. One such episode has Yossarian appearing naked in formation to be pinned with the Distinguished Flying Cross by General Dreedle. Another has Lieutenant Milo Minderbinder directing his buddies in the bombing of their own camp and leaving the runways and the mess halls intact so they could make a proper return landing and have a warm snack before retiring. But it is useless to enumerate. "So many monstrous events were occurring that he [the chaplain] was no longer positive which events were monstrous and which were really taking place." That quoted sentence can stand as characterizing the events of the entire book.

The effect of such wildly imagined actions is an artistic triumph in which the reader perceives the author's attitude as overtly playful in expression and managed event, this being the only way, or at least a meritoriously acceptable way, of facing the fundamental inhumanity and irrationality of war. The author begins with an absurdum, though the reader does not always recognize it as such, and makes it into a further and unmistakable reductio ad absurdum. It thus becomes unabashed hyperbole; its literary costume is familiar to one who has read Cervantes, or Rabelais, or Swift, or the American humorists of the Old Southwest and their principal heir, Mark Twain, who could be as darkly pessimistic as is the author of Catch-22.

Heller's comic genius, however, does not come to rest in the mere contrivances of exaggeration, daft though the exaggerations are. No part of the whole texture of objectively rendered dialogue, narrative, description, and introspective characterization fails to enhance the total artistry. Of random examples, let us cite first a bit of comic circularity—not hard to find—such as this one in which the staff psychiatrist, Major Sanderson, questions Yossarian:

"Hasn't it ever occurred to you that in your promiscuous pursuit of women you are merely trying to assuage your subconscious fears of sexual impotence?"

"Yes, sir, it has."

"Then why do you do it?"

"To assuage my fears of sexual impotence."

Even in a paragraph of only ten lines, Heller can blend a telling bit of narrative with characterization and cynical reflective analysis:

Nately was a sensitive, rich, good-looking boy with dark hair, trusting eyes, and a pain in his neck when he awoke on the sofa early the next morning and wondered dully where he was. His nature was invariably gentle and polite. He had lived for almost twenty years without trauma, tension, hate, or neurosis, which was proof to Yossarian of just how crazy he really was. His childhood had been a pleasant, though disciplined, one. He got on well with his brothers and sisters, and he did not hate his mother and father, even though they had both been very good to him.

Verbal humor crops up with considerable frequency in Catch-22. Yossarian, for example, said he "would rather die than to be killed in combat." A certain apartment maid in Rome (who wore limecolored panties) "was the most virtuous woman alive: she laid for everybody, regardless of race, creed, color or place of national origin.…" Often the irony is both humorous and grim, as in Corporal Whitcomb's form letter for Colonel Cathcart's self-serving and hypocritical condolence:

Dear Mrs., Mr., Miss, or Mr. and Mrs.: Words cannot express the deep personal grief I experienced when your husband, son, father or brother was killed, wounded or reported missing in action.

Much of the verbal humor still more acutely serves Heller's almost constant preoccupation with characterization, as when Colonel Cathcart adjures his men to attend a U.S.O. show.

"… Now, men, don't misunderstand me. This is all voluntary, of course. I'd be the last colonel in the world to order you to go to that U.S.O. show and have a good time, but I want every one of you who isn't sick enough to be in a hospital to go to that U.S.O. show right now and have a good time, and that's an order!"

Some indication of the mixture of horror and hilarity appears in examples already cited. But not enough to show how the cumulus of horror maintains itself against the pull of hilarity and finally establishes its ascendancy. Reappearing periodically throughout is Yossarian's memory of the bombing flight over Avignon when Snowden is mortally wounded and Yossarian as bombadier bandages a thigh wound of Snowden only to find that "whole mottled quarts" of Snowden's guts fall out when Yossarian rips open the injured man's flak suit. Memory of this experience recurs to Yossarian at intervals throughout the book, but it is so metered that it is only in the second to the last chapter that the horrible trauma experienced by Yossarian is brought home to the reader, helping to provide a clinching explanation of his refusal to obey any further flying orders and his decision to desert.

But there are other notable horror scenes of a different kind. In a chapter called "The Eternal City," Yossarian wanders through the bombed ruins of Rome compassionately in search of a twelveyear-old girl who has been made homeless. It is a dark night of the soul, a nightmare of the bizarre and the surrealistic typified by a blue neon sign reading: "TONY'S RESTAURANT. FINE FOOD AND DRINK. KEEP OUT." As Yossarian tramps the streets in the raw, rainy night,

A boy in a thin shirt and thin tattered trousers walked out of the darkness on bare feet.… His sickly face was pale and sad. His feet made grisly, soft, sucking sounds in the rain puddles on the wet pavement as he passed, and Yossarian was moved by such intense pity for his poverty that he wanted to smash his pale, sad, sickly face with his fist and knock him out of existence because he brought to mind all the pale, sad, sickly children in Italy.… He made Yossarian think of cripples and of cold and hungry men and women, and of all the dumb, passive, devout mothers with catatonic eyes nursing infants outdoors that same night with chilled animal udders bared insensibly to that same raw rain.

Other similarly pathetic sights whip up in Yossarian a tide of frenzied anguished questions.

The night was filled with horrors, and he thought he knew how Christ must have felt as he walked through the world, like a psychiatrist through a ward full of nuts, like a victim through a prison full of thieves.

Another dramatically moving horror scene centers on an unfortunate character whose name, given him by a father with a bizarre sense of humor, is Major Major Major. By the whim of an IBM machine he is vaulted from private to major in four days; later he is arbitrarily named squadron commander by Colonel Cathcart, whereupon Major Major Major Major is dogged by ineptitude, loneliness, and ostracism. In a desperate attempt at fellowship he joins in an outdoor basketball game, first disguising himself with dark glasses and a false moustache. The scene that follows gradually takes on the ritual killing of a scape-goat reminiscent of Shirley Jackson's brilliant horror story, "The Lottery."

The others pretended not to recognize him, and he began to have fun. Just as he finished congratulating himself on his innocent ruse he was bumped hard by one of his opponents and knocked to his knees. Soon he was bumped hard again, and it dawned on him that they did recognize him and that they were using his disguise as a license to elbow, trip and maul him. They did not want him at all. And just as he did realize this, the players on his team fused instinctively with the players on the other team into a single, howling, bloodthirsty mob that descended upon him from all sides with foul curses and swinging fists. They knocked him to the ground, kicked him while he was on the ground, attacked him again after he had struggled blindly to his feet. He covered his face with his hands and could not see. They swarmed all over each other in their frenzied compulsion to bludgeon him, kick him, gouge him, trample him. He was pummeled spinning to the edge of the ditch and sent slithering down on his head and shoulders. At the bottom he found his footing, clambered up the other wall and staggered away beneath the hail of hoots and stones with which they pelted him until he lurched into shelter around a corner of the orderly room tent.

Of course, Yossarian is no King Lear whose single tragic fault causes him to fall from on high. He lies, goldbricks, fornicates, cheats at gambling, even for a time goes about naked. Yet he is more sinned against than sinning. The military organization, commanded by a vain, selfish publicity seeking, ambitious, greedy and unscrupulous authoritarian, has persecuted his squadron beyond endurance by periodically raising the number of missions required before a flier can be sent home. The number starts at twenty-five and moves by stages up to eighty. It is only after Yossarian points out that he has now flown seventy-one "goddam combat missions" that his rebellion becomes final and he refuses to fly any more missions.

The central actions of Yossarian are nevertheless not to be seen as those of a strong-minded individualist. The entire sense of the book is that war, in itself irrational, makes everyone connected with it irrational. There are no good guys in this book. Just about everyone of the approximately two score characters of some importance is called crazy at one time or another. Not only can Nature be hostile ("There was nothing funny about living like a bum in a tent in Pianosa between fat mountains behind him and a placid blue sea in front that could gulp down a person with a cramp in a twinkling of an eye"); the Deity is likewise roundly vituperated by Yossarian. In an adulterous visit to Lieutenant Scheisskopf s wife (on Thanksgiving!) he argues with her about God.

"And don't tell me God works in mysterious ways," Yossarian continued.… "There's nothing so mysterious about it. He's not working at all. He's playing. Or else he's forgotten all about us. That's the kind of God you people talk about—a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed.… What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatalogical mind of His when He robbed old people of power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did he ever create pain?"

Even the chaplain is not immune from what seems the universal corruption of war. He

had mastered, in a moment of divine intuition, the handy technique of protective rationalization, and he was exhilarated at his discovery. It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character. With effervescent agility the chaplain ran through the whole gamut of orthodox immoralities.…

The responsive reader of Catch-22 is thus made to walk a tight-rope as he leans first to riotous humor and then tips to the side of black tragedy. There is much in the book that illustrates Charlie Chaplin's dictum that humor is "playful pain." "The minute a thing is overtragic," says Chaplin, "it is funny." And he is supported emotionally, if not logically, by W. C. Fields, who said: "I never saw anything funny that wasn't terrible. If it causes pain, it's funny; if it doesn't it isn't." The humor in Catch-22, we are forced to conclude, is only secondary. Where Heller comes through in unalleviated horror is where the message lies. The book's humor does not alleviate the horror; it heightens it by contrast.

It is not therefore the disinterestedness of pure humor that we find in Catch-22. It does not accept the pain of life with wry resignation. Instead it flaunts in bitterness the desperate flag of resistance to the wrongs of this life—wrongs suffered, not by the wholly innocent, but by the insufficiently guilty. And the wrongs are perpetrated not only by unscrupulous, ignorant, and power-hungry men, but also by the inscrutable Deity.

Source: Louis Hasley, "Dramatic Tension in Catch-22," in The Midwest Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 2, January, 1974, pp. 190-197.

Walter R. McDonald

In the following excerpt, McDonald places Yossarian's character within the tradition of "American rebels" such as Huck Finn, Hester Prynne, and Ike McCaslin.

[Text Not Available]

[Text Not Available]

[Text Not Available]

[Text Not Available]

Source: Walter R. McDonald, "He Took Off: Yossarian and the Different Drummer," in The CEA Critic, Vol. 36, No. 1, November, 1973, pp. 14-16.

Source

Nelson Algren, "The Catch," in Nation, Vol. 193, November 4, 1961, pp. 357-58.

Whitney Balliett, in a review of Catch-22, in The New Yorker, December 9, 1961, p. 247.

Marcus K. Billson II, "The Un-Minderbinding of Yossarian: Genesis Inverted in Catch-22,"in Arizona Quarterly, Vol. 36, No. 4, Winter, 1980, pp. 315-29.

Morris Dickstein, "Black Humor and History: The Early Sixties," in Partisan Review, Vol. 43, No. 2, 1976, pp. 185-211, reprinted in his Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties, Penguin, 1977, 1989, pp. 91-127.

Mike Frank, "Eros and Thanatos in Catch-22," in Canadian Review of American Studies, Spring, 1976, pp. 77-87.

Eliot Fremont-Smith, "Kvetch-22," in Village Voice, March 5, 1979, pp. 74-75.

Jean E. Kennard, "Joseph Heller: At War with Absurdity," in Mosaic, Vol. IV, No. 3, Spring, 1971, pp. 75-87.

Richard Locke, "What I Like," in New York Times Book Review, May 15, 1997, pp. 3, 36-37.

Norman Mailer, "Some Children of the Goddess," in Esquire, July, 1963, reprinted in Contemporary American novelists, edited by Harry T. Moore, Southern Illinois University Press, 1964, pp. 3-31.

Raymond M. Olderman, "The Grail Knight Departs," in Beyond the Waste Land: A Study of the American novel in the Nineteen-Sixties, Yale University Press, 1972, pp. 94-116.

Carol Pearson, "Catch-22 and the Debasement of Language," in The CEA Critic, November, 1974, pp. 30-5.

Orville Prescott, review of Catch-22, in New York Times, October 23, 1961, p. 27.

Richard G. Stem, "Bombers Away," in New York Times Book Review, October 22, 1961, p. 50.

For Further Study

Alex Cockburn, review in New Left Review, Vol. 18, January-February, 1963, pp. 87-92.

Cockbum praises Heller's humor but criticizes him for never moving beyond parody into satire.

Review in Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 92, No. 1, Winter, 1963, pp. 155-65.

A scathing review of the novel, focusing on its immoral underpinnings and Heller's faults as a writer.

Gary Lindberg, "Playing for Real," in The Confidence Man in American Literature, Oxford University Press, 1982.231-58.

Lindberg contrasts Yossarian and Milo as Confidence-men figures, and favorably compares Yossarian to Huckleberry Finn.

Robert Merrill, "The Structure and Meaning of Catch-22," in Studies in American Fiction, Vol. 14, No. 2, Autumn, 1986, pp. 139-52.

Merrill focuses on Heller's use of cyclical repetition of episodes that "move from the comic to the terrible" in the novel, causing the reader to reevaluate his own reactions to these episodes.

Robert Merrill, Joseph Heller, Twayne, 1987.

Merrill examines Heller's thematic and technical concerns in his work.

Victor J. Milne, "Heller's 'Bologniad': A Theological Perspective on Catch-22,"in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, Vol 12, No. 2, 1970, pp. 50-69.

This critical article examines Heller's use of the mock-epic form, as well as Heller's asserting a humanistic Christian ethic over a destructive competitive ethic.

James Nagel, editor, Critical Essays on Joseph Heller, G. K. Hall, 1984.

A collection of critical essays on Heller's work.

George J. Searles, "Joseph Heller," in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 28: Twentieth Century American-Jewish Fiction Writers, edited by Daniel Walden, Gale, 1984, pp. 101-107.

An overview of the author's works and career.

David Seed, The Fiction of Joseph Heller: Against the Grain, Macmillan, 1989.

A full-length study of Heller's body of work.

Leon F. Seltzer, "Milo's 'Culpable Innocence'" Absurdity as Moral Insanity in Catch-22,"in Papers on Language and Literature, Vol 15, No. 3, Summer, 1979, pp. 290-310.

Seltzer provides an in-depth study of Milo, focusing on his extreme commitment to capitalistic ideals and the moral blindness that results from this commitment.

Jan Solomon, "The Structure of Joseph Heller's Catch-22," in Critique, Vol. 9, No. 2, 1967, pp. 46-57.

Solomon asserts that the differing time sequences of Yossarian's and Milo's stories reinforce the absurdity of the novel.

Jeffrey Walsh, "Towards Vietnam: Portraying Modern War," in American War Literature 1914 to Vietnam, Macmillan, 1982, pp. 185-207.

Walsh contends that the novel's satire, themes, and forn distinguish it from the traditional war novel.