Other forms of Catch-22 are invoked throughout the novel to justify various bureaucratic actions. At one point, victims of
harassment by military agents quote the agents as having explained one of Catch-22's provisions so: Catch-22 states that agents
enforcing Catch-22 need not prove that Catch-22 actually contains whatever provision the accused violator is accused of
violating. An old woman explains: Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can’t stop them from doing.
Yossarian comes to realize that Catch-22 does not actually exist, but that because the powers that be claim it does, and the
world believes it does, nevertheless, it has potent effects. Indeed, because it does not exist there is no way it can be
repealed, undone, overthrown, or denounced. The combination of brute force with specious legalistic justification is one of the
book's primary motifs.
The motif of bureaucratic absurdity is further explored in 1994's Closing
Time, Heller's sequel to Catch-22. This darker, slower-paced, apocalyptic novel explores the pre- and post-war
lives of some of the major characters in Catch-22, with particular emphasis on the relationship between Yossarian and
tailgunner Sammy Singer.
Synopsis
The development of the novel can be split into five parts. The first (chapters 1-10) broadly follows the story of the present,
though it is fragmented with respect to the time and location and to particular events and characters. The second (chapters
11-16), flashes back to the events of the Great Big Siege of Bologna, returning to the narrative
present in the third part (chapter 17-22). The fourth (chapters 22-24) flashes back to the origins and growth of Milo’s syndicate, with the fifth and final part (chapter 25 onwards) returning again to the narrative
present with much less fragmentation than the first and third parts.[4]
While the previous four parts develop the novel in the present and by use of flash-backs, it is in chapters 29-39 of the fifth
and final part where the novel significantly darkens. Previously the reader had been cushioned from experiencing the full horror
of events, but now the events are laid bare, allowing the full effect to take place. The horror begins with the attack on the
undefended Italian mountain village, with the following chapters involving despair
(Doc Daneeka and the Chaplain), disappearance
(Orr and Dunbar) or death (McWatt, Kid Sampson, Dobbs,
Nately, Chief White Halfoat and Hungry Joe) of most of Yossarian’s friends, culminating in the unspeakable horrors of Chapter 39, in
particular the rape and murder of Michaela, who represents pure innocence.[4]
Major themes
The book sets out the absurdity of living by the rules of others, be they friends, family, governments, systems, religions or
philosophies. Heller suggests that rules left unchecked will take on a life of their own, forming a bureaucracy in which
important matters (e.g., those affecting life and death) are trivialized and trivial matters (e.g., clerical errors) assume
enormous importance. He concludes that the only way to survive such an insane system is to be insane oneself.
Another theme is the folly of patriotism and honor, which
leads most of the airmen to accept Catch-22 and the abusive lies of bureaucrats, but which Yossarian never accepts as a
legitimate answer to his complaints.
While the (official) enemy are the Germans, no German ever actually appears in the story as an enemy combatant. As the
narrative progresses, Yossarian comes to fear American bureaucrats more than he fears the Germans attempting to shoot down his
bomber. This ironic situation is epitomized in the single appearance of German personnel in the novel, who act as pilots employed
by a private entrepreneur working within the U.S. military. This predicament indicates a tension between traditional motives for
violence and the modern economic machine, which seems to generate violence simply as another means to profit, quite independent
of geographical or ideological constraints.
Among the reasons Yossarian fears his commanders more than the enemy is that , as he flies more missions, the number of
missions required before he can go home is continually increasing: he is always approaching the magic number, but he never
reaches it. He comes to despair of ever going home and is greatly relieved when he is sent to the hospital for a condition that
is almost jaundice. In Yossarian's words:
The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on, and that includes Colonel Cathcart.
And don't you forget that, because the longer you remember it, the longer you might live. (Chapter 12)
- Individual versus Society
- Yossarian is constantly fighting against society as an individual, in particular the
military bureaucracy and Milo's syndicate.[5]
- Sanity and Insanity [5]
- Heroes and Heroism [5]
- Absurdity [5]
- Power of Bureaucracy [6]
- Loss of Religious Faith [6]
- Impotence of Language [6]
- Inevitability of Death [6]
- Distortion of Justice [7]
- Concept of Catch-22 [7]
- Greed [7]
- Personal Integrity [7]
Characters
Below is a list of all the major characters in the book; there is a separate page for a complete list of characters.
Influences
Although Heller always had a desire to be an author from an early age, his own experiences as a bombardier during World War II strongly influence Catch-22.[8]
Czech writer Arnošt Lustig recounts in his book 3x18 that Joseph Heller
personally told him that he would never have written Catch-22 had he not first read The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek.[9]
Allusions/references to other works
Catch-22 contains allusions to and draws inspiration from many works of literature, both classical and modern.
Howard Jacobson, in his 2004 introduction to the Vintage Classics publication [10], wrote that the novel was "positioned teasingly ... between
literature and literature's opposites - between Rabelais and Dickens and Dostoevsky and Gogol and Céline and the Absurdists and of course Kafka on the one hand, and on the other
vaudeville and slap-stick and Bilko and Abbott and Costello and Tom and Jerry and the Goons (if Heller had ever heard of the
Goons)."
Iliad and Odyssey
Heller casts Yossarian as a modern day, anti-heroic version of Homer's epic hero
Achilles, from the Iliad. [11][12]
The analogy is explicitly suggested by Colonel Korn:
"Who does he think he is — Achilles?" Colonel Korn was pleased with the simile and filed a
mental reminder to repeat it the next time he found himself in General Peckem's
presence.
And the comparison is made more subtly in a description of the chaplain's feeling of déjà
vu:
But the chaplain's impression of a prior meeting was of some occasion far more momentous and occult than that, of a
significant encounter with Yossarian in some remote, submerged and perhaps even entirely spiritual epoch in which he had made the
identical, foredooming admission that there was nothing, absolutely nothing, he could do to help him.
Heller here alludes to Book XI of the Odyssey, in which the hero Odysseus meets a dead Achilles in Hades.[citation needed] In the underworld, Achilles asks Odysseus for help, but Odysseus cannot
give it to him.
Both works begin with the central character refusing to fight. But whereas Achilles heroically re-enters combat in response to
the death of his best friend Patroclus, Yossarian is goaded back to combat early on by mere
bureaucratic pressure. Yossarian's heroic moment is characteristically anti-heroic: after the death of Nately, towards the end of the novel, he resolutely refuses to fly more missions.
Notably, Achilles is promised either fame or a long life, and chooses fame; Yossarian, conversely, chooses life. Hence
Yossarian's antiheroic character is established early in the novel, when he explains his continued survival in terms either
delusional or wholly ironic. This explanation also goes some way to suggest other literary influences for Yossarian's
character:
They couldn’t touch him because he was Tarzan, Mandrake,
Flash Gordon. He was Bill Shakespeare. He was
Cain, Ulysses, the Flying
Dutchman; he was Lot in Sodom, Deirdre of the Sorrows, Sweeney in the nightingales among trees.
Crime and Punishment
In a dialogue between Clevinger and Yossarian, allusion is made to Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, where
Yossarian is portrayed as a mirror of Raskolnikov:
"You're crazy," Clevinger shouted vehemently, his eyes filling with tears. "You've got a Jehovah complex."
"I think everyone is Nathaniel."
Clevinger arrested himself in mid-declamation, suspiciously, "Who's Nathaniel?"
"Nathaniel who?" inquired Yossarian innocently.
Clevinger skirted the trap neatly. "You think everybody is Jehovah. You’re no better than Raskolnikov — "
"Who?"
" — yes, Raskolnikov, who — "
"Raskolnikov!"
" — who — I mean it — who felt he could justify killing an old woman — "
"No better than?"
" — yes, justify, that’s right — with an ax! And I can prove it to you!" Gasping furiously for air, Clevinger enumerated
Yossarian’s symptoms: an unreasonable belief that everybody around him was crazy, a homicidal impulse to machine-gun strangers,
retrospective falsification, an unfounded suspicion that people hated him and were conspiring to kill him.
Near the climax of the novel, during Yossarian's harrowing walk through Rome, the comparison
with Raskolnikov is again made:
He heard snarling, inhuman voices cutting through the ghostly blackness in front suddenly ... On the other side of the
intersection, a man was beating a dog with a stick like the man who was beating the horse with a whip in Raskolinov's dream.
Yossarian strained helplessly not to see or hear ... A small crowd watched. A squat women stepped out and asked him please to
stop. "Mind your own business" the man barked gruffly, lifting his stick as though he might beat her too ... Yossarian quickened
his pace to get away, almost ran ... At the next corner a man was beating a small boy brutally in midst of an immobile crowd ...
Yossarian recoiled with sickening recognition. He was certain he has witnessed that same horrible scene sometime before.
Déjà vu?
Other works
Events in the old Old Testament are regularly alluded to, and the theme of
atheism is highlighted when the Chaplain questions his
faith and the reliability of the Bible:
So many things were testing his faith. There was the Bible, of course, but the Bible was a book, and so were
Bleak House, Treasure Island,
Ethan Frome and The Last of the
Mohicans. Did it then seem probable, as he had once overheard Dunbar ask,
that the answers to riddles of creation would be supplied by people too ignorant to understand the mechanics of rainfall? Had
Almighty God, in all His infinite wisdom, really been afraid that men six thousand years ago would succeed in building a tower to
heaven?
Also mentioned are Moby Dick, the works of psychiatrist Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing
read by the sexually obsessed Mrs Scheisskopf, and allusion to William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice
when describing the Chaplain as an outsider:
If they pricked him did he not bleed? ... It seemed never to have occurred to them that be, just as they had eyes, hands,
organs, dimensions, senses and affections, that he was fed by the same food...
Heller also plays with Malvolio's lines in Twelfth Night when describing Major Major
Major:
Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.
References to nineteenth century American author Washington Irving also feature,
with Yossarian, Major Major, and Corporal
Whitcomb all forging documents with his name at some point.The 17th-century English poet John Milton's name is briefly used for the same purpose.
Literary significance and criticism
As commented on by Joseph Heller himself in the preface to Catch-22 from 1994 onwards,
the novel raised very polarised views on its first publication in the United States.
Reviews in a publications ranged from the very positive; The Nation ("was the best
novel to come out in years"), the New York Herald Tribune ("A wild,
moving, shocking, hilarious, raging, exhilarating, giant roller-coaster of a book") and the New York Times ("A dazzling performance that will outrage nearly as many readers as it delights")
to the highly negative; The New Yorker ("doesn't even seem to be written; instead,
it gives the impression of having being shouted onto paper," "what remains is a debris of sour jokes") and from another critic of
the New York Times ("is repetitive and monotonous. Or one can say that it is too short because none of its many
interesting characters and actions is given enough play to become a controlling interest"). [13]
Although the novel won no awards at publication, and some highly respected critics such as Sid
Feddema thought that the novel "was destined to fade into irrelevance in a decade or so,"[citation needed] it has stood the test of the time
and now is seen as one of the most significant novels of the 20th century.[2]
Rankings
- The Modern Library ranked Catch-22 as number 7 (by review panel) and as number
12 (by public) on its list of the greatest English language novels of the twentieth century.[14]
- The Radcliffe Publishing Course ranked Catch-22 as number 15 of the twentieth century's top 100 novels. [15]
- The Observer ranked Catch-22 as number 74 on its list of greatest novels
of all time. [16]
- Time puts Catch-22 in the top 100 English language modern novels (1923
onwards, unranked).[17]
- The Big Read by the BBC ranked Catch-22 as number 11 on
a web poll of the UK's best-loved book. [18]
Film adaptations
Catch-22 was adapted into a feature film of the same name in 1970, directed by
Mike Nichols.
Release details
This list covers the first and most recent printed publications by the original publisher Simon & Schuster as well as all other formats. Other print publishers include; Dell, Corgi, Vintage, Knopf, Black Swan, Grasset & Fasquelle and Wahlström & Widstrand.
- 1961, Simon & Schuster ISBN 0-671-12805-1, pub date June 1961, Paperback
- 1961, Simon & Schuster ISBN 0-440-51120-8, advance Paperback with signed bookplate
- 1978, Franklin Library ISBN 0-8124-1717-8, signed limited edition Leather Bound
- 1984, Caedmon Audio ISBN 0-694-50253-7, Audio Cassette
- 1996, Simon & Schuster ISBN 0-684-83339-5, pub date September 1996 Paperback
- 1980, Books On Tape ISBN 0-7366-8962-1, unabridged Audio Cassette reader Wolfram
Kandinsky
- 1980, Books On Tape ISBN 0-7366-9085-9, unabridged Audio CD reader Jim Weiss
- 1994, DH Audio ISBN 0-88646-125-1, abridged edition Audio Cassette reader
Alan Arkin
- 1999, Simon & Schuster ISBN 0-684-86513-0, pub date October 1999, Hardback
See also
Notes and references
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
- ^ Paul Bacon cover artist
- ^ a b "What is Catch-22? And why does the book matter?" BBC
- ^ a b N James. The Early Composition History of Catch-22. In Biographies of
Books: The Compositional Histories of Notable American Writings, J Barbour, T Quirk (edi.) pp. 262-90. Columbia: University of
Missouri Press, 1996.
- ^ a b Clinton S. Burhans, Jr. Spindrift and the Sea: Structural Patterns and
Unifying Elements in Catch 22. Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 19, No. 4, pp. 239-250, 1973. JSTOR online access
- ^ a b c d Catch-22 Themes BookRags
- ^ a b c d Catch-22 Themes, Motifs and Symbols SparkNotes
- ^ a b c d Catch-22 Themes
CliffsNotes
- ^ DM Craig. From Avignon to Catch-22. War, Literature, and the Arts 6,
no. 2, 1994 pp27-54.
- ^ Personal testimony by Arnošt Lustig
- ^ Random House ISBN 978-0-09-947046-5
Vintage Classics
- ^ Charlie Reilly, An Interview with Joseph Heller,
Contemporary Literature, Vol. 39, No. 4. 1998, pp. 507-522.
- ^ Quote taken from Melvin Seiden, in The Nation,
1961
- ^ The Internet Public Library: Online Literary Criticism Collection
- ^ http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/100bestnovels.html Modern Library's 100 best novels of the twentieth century
- ^ Radcliffe Publishing Course: the twentieth century's top 100 novels
- ^ The Observer's greatest novels of all time
- ^ Time (magazine)'s top 100 English language modern
novels
- ^ The BBC's Big Read
External links
