Catch-22 (1961). Detailed description

Inspired by Heller’s experiences as a bombardier in the U.S. Army Air Corps during the latter half of World War II, Catch-22 remains one of the greatest satirical works of American fiction in the 20th century. Though belonging to the war novel genre, Catch-22 has as its major preoccupation the conflict between individuals and what Heller calls “the contemporary regimented business society,” a theme he later explored directly in his second novel, Something Happened (Heller, Realist 30).

Heller’s protagonist in Catch-22, John Yossarian, spends the entire novel trying to stay alive in a world where everybody, he is convinced, is trying to kill him. This conviction, which initially sounds absurd and paranoid, becomes increasingly plausible to the reader as Heller describes the ineptitude, insanity, and prevailing disregard for humanity surrounding Yossarian. At the start of the novel, Yossarian seems mentally unstable, paranoid, cowardly, and depraved. By the end of the narrative, after readers have been inculcated with Heller’s vision of modern war and military bureaucracy, Yossarian appears to be the sanest of men, trying to extricate himself from an insane world that values conformity over common sense, profit over ethics, obedience over life.

A darkly humorous and satirical novel, Catch-22 follows—albeit in an experimental, nonlinear manner— the wartime trials of Captain John Yossarian, a bombardier stationed on the fictitious island of Pianosa during World War II. Unlike his fellow officers, Yossarian remains unmoved by patriotism or any other rationale for putting his life at risk: For Yossarian, the only goal worth pursuing is staying alive. To this end, Yossarian attempts to ground himself and his squadron from combat missions in various, often humorous ways.

All of Yossarian’s attempts to avoid combat by claiming insanity are foiled by “catch-22,” an unofficial but all-pervasive law that states that anyone concerned for his life in the face of imminent death is rational and therefore not crazy enough to be grounded. This law takes various forms at different points in the narrative but always serves as a mechanism to entrap Yossarian, keeping him anchored to his appointed cog in the big, bureaucratic war machine. Faced with no alternatives and few surviving friends, who are “disappeared” one by one, Yossarian eventually deserts to Sweden.

Though Catch-22 can and should be considered a part of the war novel genre, as exemplified by such works as Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948), Heller populates Pianosa almost exclusively with flat caricatures of the character types normally used in the genre, often confounding our expectations. The commanding officer of the squadron, for example, Major Major Major, promoted by a glitch in an I.B.M. machine, is a hyperbolic caricature of the inept and out-of-touch superior, a leader so ineffective and distant that he orders his assistant to bar anyone from his office while he is there.

Lieutenant Sheisskopf, Yossarian’s cuckolded commander while he is being trained to go overseas, who dreams of the day when he can surgically alter his cadets with metal rods so they can march in perfect lockstep, is yet another parody of the incompetent superior, in this case one bent on enforcing total conformity. Major Major Major’s executive officer, Major de Coverley is a humorous example of the brave, steely eyed wartime commander who leads from the front lines. Often present at the head of the allied advance, de Coverley has one significant achievement, his prompt securing of apartments and maids in the recently liberated city of Rome for the squadron’s vacationing officers and enlisted men.

Other character types abound in the novel, comically exaggerated beyond the semblance of realism. The affable southerner is represented by the friendly and patriotic Texan Yossarian encounters in the hospital ward whom no one can stand to be around. The various ethnic character types that populate war novels are caricatured by the alcoholic Chief White Halfoat, whose oil-divining Native American family has been chased off whatever land they occupy by oil companies. Here Heller is obviously satirizing the disenfranchisement of Native Americans during and after America’s westward expansion, as well as playing off the conventions of the war novel.

Thus, Catch-22 parodies the war novel genre to great comic effect while depicting war itself in a grotesque, dark, and serious fashion. Heller maintains Catch-22’s somber and dark depiction of war by structuring the comic episodes of the novel around retellings of Yossarian’s mission to Avignon, during which he sees a crew member, Snowden, slowly die of wounds suffered from an explosion of flak. These flashbacks become incrementally clearer with each repetition, eventually culminating in the disclosure of Snowden’s “secret”; after Snowden’s innards spill out of a wound Yossarian had not seen or treated, he observes: “Man was matter, that was Snowden’s secret.

Drop him out of a window and he’ll fall. Set fire to him and he’ll burn. Bury him and he’ll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden’s secret. Ripeness was all” (Catch-22 404). This passage, echoing a line from William Shakespeare’s 1608 play King Lear (5.2.9), not only articulates the frailty of life—the delicate mortality of human beings—but also marks Yossarian’s realization that the institutions that bind him will eventually turn him into “garbage”: a man without a soul. This realization jars Yossarian out of his complacency, awakening him to the absurdities inherent in risking one’s life for no particularly compelling reason. As the infinitely pragmatic and self-preserving old Italian responsible for injuring Major de Coverley’s eye states, “It is better to live on one’s feet than die on one’s knees” (Catch-22 233).

The old man, as becomes clear during his long exchange with Yossarian’s young and patriotic friend Nately, embodies and articulates the philosophy of action Heller’s protagonist arrives at after the mission to Avignon: No nation—which the old man describes as “a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural.”—is worth dying for (232). After this ordeal, a ceremony is held to award Yos- sarian a medal for his heroism, to which he shows up naked, unadorned by the blood-soaked uniform that has placed him in harm’s way and now serves as a testament to Snowden’s “secret.” The “madness” Yossarian exhibits throughout the novel is caused by this scarring event, an event that, as it is recounted with more and more detail, justifies Yossarian’s temperament and reveals the prevailing insanity that surrounds him.

As we can see in the elaborately conceived outline for Catch-22 (which can be found in the second appendix of David M. Craig’s Tilting at Mortality: Narrative Strategies in Joseph Heller’s Fiction), Heller was deliberate in his construction of the novel’s chaotic narration, taking great pains to ensure its formal coherency. In this sense, Heller follows the art of the novel as described by Henry James and E. M. Forster. But what makes Heller’s work so distinctive, so jarring, is the way he deals with time, the back-and-forth movement that makes the reader of Catch-22 dizzy. Everything happens at once, and yet nothing is easily sorted out, an effect that, along with Heller’s use of repetition, echoes the cognitive illness Yossarian feigns after his roommate in a stateside hospital starts “seeing everything twice.”

In this way, Heller comments on the way we think—the random and associational way that thoughts and memories intrude on the present, jarring us from the present and whirling us ceaselessly, like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, into the past. In yet another way, this “double vision” Yossarian assumes is an apt metaphor for the comic and tragic elements Heller continually juxtaposes throughout the novel. Incidents that readers are initially inclined to find humorous, such as Yossarian’s nakedness at the award ceremony, or the hijinks that ensue when Yossarian and his friends vacation in Rome, are later cast in a dark, grotesque fashion, forcing us to reevaluate them, to “see them twice.”

This narrative strategy adds to the sense of absurdity the novel cultivates, mirroring the central concept Heller introduces us to: Just as “catch-22” —a paradoxical statement or series of statements that undermine their own validity—involves negation, the comic elements of the novel are overtaken by grotesque and tragic depictions of death and loss. Comedy remains, but it coexists with the tragic in a nebulous and chaotic space, a space detached from the reader’s common understanding of time.

In addition to repeating the Snowden episode with more clarity as the novel progresses, Heller adds a sense of forward movement to the nonchronologi- cal narrative of Catch-22 by increasing the number of missions Yossarian and the other crew members have to complete before they can be sent home. Colonel Cathcart, the group commander under whom Yossarian serves, is a self-serving and incompetent administrator whose only objective in the war is to produce “tight bomb patterns” for his superiors to admire in postbombing reconnaissance photos.

Despite the fact that bomber crews, according to headquarters, need only complete 40 combat missions, Cathcart is convinced that raising the number will make his bomber group seem all the more heroic, a “feather in his cap” that will contribute to a future promotion. In accordance with the laws of “catch-22,” Yossarian and his fellow airmen are officially required to complete 40 missions, but, since they must obey their commanding officer, are compelled to complete as many missions as Cathcart pleases. Thus, one of the only linear elements in Catch-22’s plot is the raising of the number of required missions—a progressive lessening of the value of human life—in the name of Cathcart’s petty desire for advancement. The only respite for Yossarian and the other airmen lies in the hospital ward or the apartments appropriated for their R&R time in Rome, where alcohol and prostitutes are indulged in with great zeal.

The dehumanizing effects of bureaucracy on the individual, where men become numbers that are mechanistically shuffled about without regard for their humanity, are symbolically represented in the novel by the soldier in white. An airman presumably burned beyond recognition and encased in a full body cast, the soldier in white is a fixture in the hospital ward Yossarian and his friend Dunbar have fled to with feigned illnesses at the beginning of the narrative. With his entire body covered in white gauze, save for his mouth and two tubes though which the nurses remove his liquid waste, the soldier in white is a symbolic representation of what the military bureaucracy turns human beings into.

Yossarian and Dunbar go so far as to speculate whether or not the hidden soldier is alive or even exists. This perceived lack of humanity betrays Heller’s scathing view of both war and modern bureaucracy. Prefiguring the fate of many of Yossarian’s friends, the unknown soldier is whisked off when no one is looking, “disappeared” by the opaque workings of the military machine, itself a representation of the ever-expanding role of institutions in the contemporary world.

Yet what also traps Yossarian and, by analogy, all of us, is the language we use, the sort of bureaucratic language of which military regulations, business correspondences, and medical terminology are made. The characters who populate Heller’s vision ofWorld War II, flat as they are, are stripped of humanity, reduced to insignificant signs. As does the soldier in white, whose presence is only marked by the cast that surrounds him, the characters lack individuality and substance: Their presence—even their existence—is marked only by their name, rank, and serial number.

This substitution of language for life is exemplified by the predicament of Doc Daneeka, the group’s physician, who, according to the squadron log, has died in a plane crash. Despite the fact that he is very much alive and protesting his deceased status, the world goes on, incapable of recognizing his existence after it has ceased on paper. Yossarian, at the opening of the novel, is engaged in subverting language as he subverts every other form of bureaucratic restraint in the novel, declaring “death to all modifiers” as he censors the letters of enlisted men to their families from his hospital bed.

Just as Yossarian’s moving of the bomb line on the briefing room map causes the chain of command to postpone the bombing of a heavily fortified city, these acts of subversion catch on. Others who feel marginalized, such as Major Major Major, appropriate “Washington Irving,” Yossarian’s reversible pen name. Undercover CID men, incompetent equivalents of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents, are dispatched by wing headquarters to arrest this Washington Irving, who only exists in official correspondences and personal letters. Similarly, Yossarian’s signing of the “Anabaptist” Chaplain’s name to one of these letters makes him a perpetual object of suspicion.

In Heller’s world of institutions, imaginary people become real and actual characters are “disappeared,” through both physical means and language. In either case, the reality of the novel and accounts of reality in the novel become blurred, each exerting a nearly equal effect on the plot. The policing of language on Pianosa and the resulting infestation of C.I.D. men form a thinly veiled commentary on the paranoia, suspicion, and tattletale characteristic of postwar American society during the McCarthy hearings, a time when the mere suggestion of communist sympathies, however unfounded, was enough to attract the attention of the FBI.

Toward the end of the novel, Heller expands this vision of how the modern world dehumanizes people during Yossarian’s attempt to find and save “Nately’s whore’s kid-sister” in the streets of Rome. This Dan- tesque descent, which catalogs various manifestations of human depravity and cruelty, ends with Yossarian’s confronting Aarfy, the bumbling, gentlemanly, and aloof fraternity brother who serves as navigator in his plane, after he pushes a prostitute out of his bedroom window. This morally reprehensible act is unpunished by the police, who immediately put Yossarian under arrest for being in Rome without permission. Again, Heller portrays the military bureaucracy as being more concerned with its own logistical rules and objectives than anything resembling ethical conduct.

In the end, Yossarian’s only alternative is to desert to Sweden, following the example of his tent mate, Orr, who, it would seem, fits Heller’s conception of what a smart, self-preserving individual should do in Yossarian’s predicament. A handyman who builds a gas stove from scratch in their tent, Orr is patient and detail-oriented. Just as he constantly fidgets with the gas valve on the stove, Orr observes the mechanism that has entrapped him and slowly practices escaping, crash landing his plane in the Mediterranean many times before he ditches it and paddles to Sweden in a life raft. Unlike Yossarian’s comic acts of resistance and ineffectual attempts to con the system, Orr provides the lasting solution: Leave when no one is looking.

Heller has stated that Catch-22 has more to do with “the contemporary regimented business society” of postwar America than any of his experiences in Europe (Realist 30). Though it is hard to put aside the grotesque and absurd depictions of war in Catch-22, one can glimpse the Coney Island barkers, incapable of losing, behind every catch Yossarian encounters. Indeed, much can be made of the satirical lens Heller provides readers to view contemporary, commercialized society: Lieutenant Milo Minderbinder, squadron mess officer, and his one-man corporation, M&M Enterprises, is a splendid representation of capitalism and thinly veiled greed run amok, despite Milo’s seemingly benign and good- hearted intent.

Having a natural knack for navigating the often twisted logic of supply and demand, Milo profits from selling eggs for less than he buys them, only erring when he corners the market on Egyptian cotton and cannot sell any of it. An example of good intentions gone awry, Milo tries to cover the cotton in chocolate and feed it to the squadron. The spectacle of Milo’s mercenary courier fleet, comprising of both German and allied bombers, bombing the wing’s own airstrip for a profit is a brilliant, albeit hyperbolic, representation of the absurdities and hypocrisies that result when market forces supplant or remain unchecked by ethical considerations.

Moreover, Heller’s blurring of the war effort with Milo’s empire of black market commerce echoes concerns many had during the cold war (and continue to have) regarding what President Dwight Eisenhower referred to as the “military-industrial complex.” This term denotes the intimate relationship between those in the American government who control the prosecution of foreign policy and the powerful manufacturing firms that produce weaponry and materiel. These corporations, profit-seeking and influential, are often feared to have a negative influence over U.S. foreign policy that is contrary to the will of the American people and not oriented toward peaceful resolutions of potentially violent international conflict.

A hilarious and profound statement on war, American society, and the absurd existential predicament of individuals enveloped by the invasive workings of modern bureaucracy, Catch-22 continues to be read and taught across the nation. Heller’s unconventional narrative style and adept blend of comic and grotesque elements in his first novel distinguished him as a promising young writer with a unique vision of his craft. By virtue of his performance in Catch-22, Heller occupies a place in the history of letters populated by such renowned writers as Jonathan Swift, Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, and Thomas Pynchon. Many of the insights Heller fleshed out in the novel still ring true today, offering us an entertaining and biting satire on war and modern bureaucracy.

For Discussion or Writing
1. As does Catch-22, Randall Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” shows not only the debilitating effects of war but also its long-term psychological effects, which continue to plague both civilian and veteran alike. In Jarrell’s poem, the soldier/child narrator describes his own death, echoing the author’s own tormented psyche. In Catch-22, the narrator (Yossarian) recounts the death of Snowden; the memory of his death not only haunts the narrator but also intervenes in the narration so that the form of the book is structured around his remembrances of a catastrophic event. With both works in mind, write a well-developed essay on memory and loss as this theme is played out in Jarrell’s poem and in Heller’s novel.

2. There are many similarities between Catch-22 and The Good Soldier Svejk and His Fortunes in the World War, an unfinished novel written in 1923 by the Czechoslovakian humorist Jaroslav Hasek. Heller himself, according to Arnost Lustig, admitted that the composition of his novel would have been impossible had he not read Hasek’s satire, which stands as one of the first antiwar novels published in modern times. After reading Hasek’s novel, write a well-developed essay exploring the similarities between the two works. How does Heller adapt and appropriate Hasek’s World War I satire? Are these changes the result of Heller’s interest in satirizing postwar America, or does Heller have a distinctly unique worldview that necessitates a change in narrative style and content? Be sure to refer to specific sections in the texts to bolster your argument.

3. Catch-22, despite its comic and satirical qualities, is a novel about war. Read other examples of the war novel genre: Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948) and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929). Next, compare Heller’s treatment of the subject with that of these two other seminal authors known for their sober, realistic depictions of war. Think about the tone of these three works and the way they convey their antiwar messages. Finally, write a well-developed essay that evaluates Heller’s work in light of the other two works and considers whether satire is an appropriate medium to deal with loss.

4. Watch Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957), a depiction of World War I trench warfare and a story of soldiers, who, when weighing their own value against the futility of fighting, choose to retreat, ultimately being tried and executed for dereliction of duty. Think about what Kubrick accomplishes by using a hyperrealistic depiction of war and then contrast his representation with the graphic scenes in Heller’s Catch-22. Finally, write a well-developed essay on the representation of violence in fiction, citing both works to support everything you say. Be sure to consider the different mediums and how their differences affect the reader/viewer.

5. As yet another contrast to Heller’s representation of war and drawing upon a completely different genre, read section 15 of Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” (1865), a poignant tribute to President Abraham Lincoln and a lamentation for those lost in the Civil War. Finally, assess both Heller’s and Whitman’s depiction of violence. Are the two complementary? Does one justify violence, or do they both vilify the notion of a “just war”?

6. Intertextuality deals with the relationship between texts, the way works of fiction reference one another and relate to one another. Sometimes authors create deliberate relationships; other times authors, working independently, cover similar ground, creating works that resonate with each other. Regardless of whether authors intend their works to be compared, we see them differently when we encounter them in tandem. This is the nature of intertextuality: We negotiate the world through texts that we string together, forging an overall narrative and even a worldview based on our reading/viewing. With this in mind, read M*A*S*H: A Novel about Three Army Doctors by Richard Hooker and see Robert Altman’s movie M*A*S*H. Finally, write a well- developed essay that assesses how these works and Catch-22 form a composite picture of war in the 20th century.

7. Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) deals with the institutionalization of individuals considered to be insane. Similarly, those around him consider Catch-22’s protagonist, John Yossarian, insane. In a well-developed essay, compare Heller’s and Kesey’s treatment of madness and how the novel’s respective institutions deal with it. Pay special attention to Heller’s descriptions ofYossarian’s time in hospitals, especially the episode when we are introduced to the man who “sees everything twice.” Do Kesey and Heller share similar views regarding institutions? More specifically, compare the strategies John Yossarian and Randle Patrick McMurphy employ to subvert these institutions.