Yossarian defiantly
refuses to fly more missions. Colonel Cathcart offers Yossarian an arrangement:
Yossarian will be sent home if he commits to praising his commanding officer.
Understanding that such a deal would deceive his fellow soldier, Yossarian denied
selling out.
The
chaplain gives Yossarian the exciting news that his previous tent-mate, Orr,
has washed ashore in Sweden after missing in the sea for few days. Yossarian
understands that Orr was not the botching pilot that he claimed to be. Rather,
Orr shrewdly practiced his escape with each planned crash landing. Out of much
excitement, Yossarian chooses to flee and join Orr in Sweden. Yossarian finds
that there is nothing of the sort of Catch-22. Notwithstanding, it doesn’t
make a difference, since individuals have confidence in it in any way. He would
not stay and danger of being slaughtered in a practically finished war. Yossarian
flies away to Sweden, resolved to remain alive.
Summary — Chapter 1: The Texan
Not wanting to face the violence
of World War II, Yossarian, an American soldier, has gone to an Italian
military hospital claiming to have pain in his liver. The doctors seem unable
to prove that he is well, so they let him stay, though they are puzzled that
his condition is neither improving nor worsening. The hospital patients are
required to censor letters traveling between the soldiers and their loved ones
at home. Yossarian plays games with the letters, deleting words according to
his own illogical rules and affixing his signature as “Washington Irving.”
He shares the hospital ward with his friend Dunbar, a bandaged, immobile
man called “the soldier in white,” and a pair of nurses who appear to hate
Yossarian.
AnsociableTexan is
admitted to the ward one day, and the Texan tries to convince the patients that
“decent folk” deserve extra votes. The Texan’s patriotism deeply annoys the
other patients. Meanwhile, a chaplain comes to see Yossarian, who enjoys
the chaplain’s company. But within ten days of the Texan’s arrival at the
hospital, almost everyone, including Yossarian, flees the ward out of irritation
with the Texan, recovering from his or her ailments and returning to active
duty.
Summary — Chapter 2: Clevinger
When he leaves the hospital,
Yossarian feels that he is the only one concerned about the senseless war in
which millions of young men are bombing each other. He remembers arguing about
the nature of the war with an officer in his group named Clevinger.
Yossarian had claimed that everyone was trying to kill him, while Clevinger
argued that no one was trying to kill Yossarian personally. Yossarian had
rejected Clevinger’s arguments about countries and honor; for Yossarian, the noticeable
fact was that people kept shooting at him.
Yossarian sees his roommate,
Orr, and finds out that Clevinger is still missing. He remembers the last time
he and Clevinger called each other crazy, during a night at the officers’ club
when Yossarian announced to everyone present that he was superhuman because no
one had managed to kill him yet. Yossarian is suspicious of everyone when he
gets out of the hospital. He has a delicious meal in Milo’s gourmet mess
hall, then talks to Doc Daneeka, who maddens Yossarian by telling him
that Colonel Cathcart has raised the number of missions required before
a soldier can be discharged from forty-five to fifty. At the time of this
change, Yossarian had flown forty-four missions.
Summary — Chapter 3: Havermeyer
Orr tells Yossarian a
nonsensical story about how he liked to stuff crab apples in his cheeks when he
was younger. Yossarian briefly remembers an episode in Rome during which a
whore beat Orr over the head with her shoe. Yossarian reflects on Orr’s size;
he is even smaller than Huple, a young boy who lives near Hungry Joe’s tent.
Hungry Joe has nightmares whenever he is not scheduled to fly a mission the
next day, and his screaming keeps the whole camp awake. Hungry Joe’s tent is
near a road where the men sometimes pick up girls and take them out to the tall
grass across the road from an open-air movie theater.
A U.S.O. (United Service
Organizations) troupe that visited the theater that afternoon has been sent by
an ambitious general named P. P. Peckem, who hopes to take over the command of
Yossarian’s unit from General Dreedle. General Peckem’stroubleshooter, Colonel
Cargill, used to be a marketing executive paid by Wall Street firms to fail at
marketing so that they could establish tax losses. Cargill does much the same
thing now as a colonel: he fails most notably at bringing enthusiasm to the
men, some of whom have finished their fifty missions and anxiously hope their
orders to return home arrive before Colonel Cathcart raises the number of
missions again.
Yossarian feels sick, but Doc
Daneeka refuses to ground him. Doc Daneeka advises Yossarian to emulate Havermeyer,
a fearless bombardier, and make the best of his situation. But Yossarian thinks
that his fear is healthy. The narrator notes that Havermeyer likes to shoot
mice in the middle of the night and that he once woke Hungry Joe with a shot
that compelled him to dive into a slit trench. These slit trenches had
mysteriously appeared beside every tent the morning following the mess officer
Milo Minderbinder’s bombing of the squadron.
Summary — Chapter 4: Doc Daneeka
The narrator explains that
Hungry Joe is crazy and thus Yossarian is trying to give him advice. Hungry Joe
won’t listen, however, because he thinks Yossarian is crazy. Doc Daneeka, in
turn, tells Yossarian that his own problems are worse than Hungry Joe’s because
the war has interrupted his lucrative medical practice
Yossarian remembers trying to
disrupt the educational meeting in Captain Black’s intelligence tent by asking
unanswerable questions, which caused Group Headquarters to make a rule that
the only people who could ask questions were the ones who never did. This
rule comes from Colonel Cathcart and Lieutenant Colonel Korn. These two
colonels also approved the construction of a skeet-shooting range at which
Yossarian never hits anything. Dunbar, though, shoots skeet frequently because
he hates it. Dunbar believes that when he engages in activities that are boring
or uncomfortable, time passes more slowly and he thereby lengthens his life. He
argues with Clevinger about this theory. Meanwhile, ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen has
started a panic among the officers in Rome by telephoning them and saying only,
“T. S. Eliot.” Although he intends these words as a response to a
general memo from a colonel saying that it would be hard to name a poet who makes
any money, General Peckem assumes that the words constitute a coded message and
suffers great anxiety as a result.
Summary — Chapter 5: Chief White
Halfoat
There was only one catch and
that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety . . .
was the process of a rational.
In the tent that Doc Daneeka and
an alcoholic Native American named Chief White Halfoat share, Doc Daneeka
describes his corrupt Staten Island medical practice to Yossarian. He tells him
about some sexually inept newlyweds who once visited his office. Chief White
Halfoat enters, telling Yossarian that Doc Daneeka is crazy. Halfoat then relates
the story of his own family: because every place that he and his family settled
turned out to be on top of a significant oil supply, major oil companies began
following them, using them as “human divining rods.” The oil companies then
kicked them off the land, forcing the family to live a nomadic life.
Yossarian again pleads with Doc
Daneeka to be grounded, asking if he would be grounded if he were crazy. Doc
Daneeka replies that he would, and Yossarian argues that he is indeed crazy.
Doc Daneeka then describes Catch-22, a regulation holding that, in order to be
grounded for insanity, a pilot must ask to be grounded; but any pilot who asks
to be grounded must be sane since sane people would never want to fly bombing
missions. Impressed, Yossarian takes Doc Daneeka’s word for it, just as he had
taken Orr’s word about the flies in Appleby’s eyes: Orr had insisted that there
are flies in Appleby’s eyes, and though Yossarian had no idea what Orr meant,
he believed him because Orr had never lied to him before.
Yossarian begins thinking about
bombing missions and how much he hates his position in the nose of the plane,
where he is separated from the escape hatch by a passage just wide enough to
fit through. On these bombing missions, Yossarian is always terrified for his
life, and he pleads with the pilot, McWatt, to avoid antiaircraft fire. He
remembers one mission when, while the squadron was taking evasive action,
Dobbs, the co-pilot, went crazy and started screaming, “Help him.” The plane
spun out of control and Yossarian believed he was going to die. Enigmatically,
the narrator states that someone named Snowden lay dying in the back of the
plane.
Summary — Chapter 6: Hungry Joe
Although Hungry Joe has already
flown his fifty missions, the orders to send him home never come, and he
continues to scream at night. Doc Daneeka ignores Hungry Joe’s problems and
instead complains about having been forced to leave his clinic. Hungry Joe is
mad with lust; his desperate attempts to take pictures of naked women always end
in failure, as the pictures do not come out. To get women to pose for him,
Hungry Joe pretends to be an important Life magazine
photographer—ironically, he was a photographer for Life before
the war. Hungry Joe has flown six tours of duty, but every time he finishes
one, Colonel Cathcart raises the number of missions required before Hungry Joe
can be sent home. With each increase in the minimum number of missions, Hungry
Joe’s nightmares stop until he finishes another tour. The narrator tells us
that Colonel Cathcart is very brave about volunteering his men for the most
dangerous missions.
Appleby, another member of the
squadron, is equally brave in his Ping-Pong games. One night, Orr, Yossarian’s
roommate, attacks Appleby in the middle of a game. A fight breaks out, and
Chief White Halfoat breaks the nose of Colonel Moodus, General Dreedle’s
son-in-law. General Dreedle so enjoys witnessing this abuse of his son-in-law
that he keeps calling Chief White Halfoat in to repeat the performance and
moves him into Doc Daneeka’s tent to make sure that Halfoat remains in top
physical condition.
Ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen gives
Yossarian another definition of Catch-22, one that requires him to fly the
extra missions that Colonel Cathcart orders, even though Twenty-seventh Air
Force regulations demand only forty missions. The reasoning is that the
regulations state also that Yossarian must obey all of Cathcart’s orders, and
Cathcart has raised the number of missions again, this time to fifty-five.
Summary — Chapter 7: McWatt
McWatt, Yossarian’s pilot,
manages to display a cheeriness in the face of war, even though he is perfectly
sane. This contradiction leads Yossarian to believe that McWatt, who is smiling
and polite and who loves to whistle show tunes, is the “craziest combat man” in
the unit.
Yossarian gets a letter from Doc
Daneeka about his liver that orders the mess hall to give Yossarian all the
fresh fruit he wants. Nervous that his liver will improve—which would mean
having to leave the hospital—Yossarian refuses to eat the fruit. Milo, however,
tries to persuade Yossarian to sell the fruit on the black market, but
Yossarian refuses. Milo explains to Yossarian his desire to serve the best
meals in the entire world in his mess hall and his nervousness about his chef,
Corporal Snark, who poisoned his entire previous squadron by putting GI soap in
the sweet potatoes.
Milo becomes indignant when he
learns that a C.I.D. (Criminal Investigation Division) man is searching for a
criminal who has been forging Washington Irving’s name in censored letters. He
thinks the investigation is a ploy to expose him for selling items on the black
market. Milo wants to organize the men into a syndicate, a concept that he
tries to explain to Yossarian by stealing McWatt’s bedsheet, ripping it into
pieces, and redistributing it. Yossarian does not understand Milo’s version of
economics, which largely involves cheating whomever he is trading with and then
claiming moral superiority.
Clevinger does not understand
Milo’s plan either, even though he usually understands everything about the war
except for the arbitrary way in which things happen. Yossarian remembers
training in America with Clevinger under Lieutenant Scheisskopf, who had been
obsessed with parades, and whose wife, along with her friend Dori Duz, had
slept with all the men under her husband’s command. Lieutenant Scheisskopf
hates Clevinger and finally gets him sent to trial under a belligerent colonel.
At the trial, Clevinger is unable to communicate his innocence because he is
harangued about using improper modes of address. Clevinger is extremely
confused by his superiors’ hatred of him; he realizes that Lieutenant
Scheisskopf and the colonel harbor animosity toward him that no enemy soldier
ever could.
Summary — Chapter 9: Major
MajorMajorMajor
The narrator explains the
details of Major Major Major’s troubled childhood. His unfortunate name is a
result of his father’s twisted sense of humor and causes Major much distress
throughout his youth. Major also bears a strong resemblance to Henry Fonda,
upon which people constantly comment, and he does so well in school as a child
that the FBI monitors him on suspicion that he is a communist. His troubles
continue when an IBM computer error makes him a major the day he joins the
army, resulting in his new name, Major MajorMajorMajor. His sudden promotion
stuns his drill sergeant, who then has to train a man who is suddenly his
superior officer. Luckily, Major Major applies for aviation cadet training and
is sent away to Lieutenant Scheisskopf, who is himself confused about how to
interact with an officer who outranks him but to whom he is a commanding
officer. Scheisskopf trains Major quickly to get rid of him, and sends him to
Pianosa, where Yossarian’s squadron is stationed. Not long after arriving in
Pianosa, where Major is happy for the first time in his life, he is made
squadron commander by a vengeful Colonel Cathcart. As a result, Major loses all
his friends, who become servile in his presence.
Major Major has always been a
drab, mediocre sort of person and has never had friends before; he lapses into
an awkward depression and refuses to be seen in his office. To make himself
feel better, Major Major forges Washington Irving’s name on official documents.
He is confused about everything, including his official relationship to Major
—— de Coverley, his executive officer: he does not know whether he is Major ——
de Coverley’s subordinate or vice versa. A C.I.D. a man comes to investigate
the Washington Irving scandal, but Major Major denies knowledge of it. The
incompetent C.I.D. man believes him—as does another C.I.D. man who arrives
shortly thereafter then leaves to investigate the first C.I.D. man. Major Major
starts wearing dark glasses and a false mustache when forging Washington
Irving’s name; he even forges a few “John Milton” signatures, just for variety.
One day, Yossarian tackles Major Major and demands to be grounded. Major Major
sadly tells Yossarian that there is nothing he can do.
Summary — Chapter 10:
Wintergreen
Clevinger’s plane disappears in
a cloud off the coast of Elba, and he is presumed dead. Yossarian, however, is
unable to conceive of Clevinger’s death, and instead assumes that he is simply,
and inexplicably, missing. The narrator then describes
ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen’s past: back in the U.S., ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen
continually goes AWOL. He is required to dig holes and fill them up again
as punishment—work he approaches as a duty to his country. One day,
ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen nicks a water pipe, and water sprays everywhere.
Since Chief White Halfoat is with Wintergreen, everyone assumes that it is oil,
and Halfoat and Wintergreen are both sent away to Pianosa.
Yossarian recalls Mudd, a
soldier who had arrived at the camp and died in combat before even reporting
for duty. Nobody can actually remember Mudd, but his belongings remain in
Yossarian’s tent and seem to be “contaminated with death.” This reminder of
death causes Yossarian to think about the deadly mission of the Great Big Siege
of Bologna, for which Colonel Cathcart had bravely volunteered his men. At the
time, not even sick men could be grounded by doctors. One of the doctors, Dr.
Stubbs, asked cynically what point there was to save lives when everyone was
going to die anyway. Dunbar replied that the point was to live as long as
possible and forget about the fact that death was inevitable.
Analysis — Chapters
6–10
In these chapters, many of the
novel’s characters begin to accept the futility and illogic of the actions that
the army and higher levels of bureaucracy demand of those involved in the war
effort. First among those who resign themselves to the absurdity is Major
MajorMajorMajor, one of the most comical and improbable characters in the
novel: all his life, Major Major has been the victim of bureaucratic forces
beyond his control—his birth certificate, the IBM machine—and he
eventually turns on these forces by forging false names on official documents. How
he rebels against the system reflects both his own dissatisfaction with his
ludicrous name, which bureaucracy has generated, and the reliance upon names,
cataloging, and indexing perpetuated by the bureaucracy. Major —— de Coverley
is another ridiculous and paradoxical figure, a revered old man with no
important duties who plays horseshoes all day and is utterly irrelevant to the
war. Actions, too, can be irrelevant and nonsensical:
ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen’s punishment for going AWOL is to dig
holes and then fill them back up again. Wintergreen says that he doesn’t mind
doing it, so long as it is “part of the war effort.” Obviously, his task is not
helping the Allies win the war; its uselessness suggests that so many other
actions that the army seems to believe are necessary are actually a waste of
time. A similar sense of futility occurs with Major Major’s realization that
the documents he signs keep coming back to him for more signatures. His life is
consumed with paperwork that repeats itself in an endless cycle in which nothing
gets accomplished.
Catch-22’s mosaic of anecdotes, whose
chronological placement remains largely beyond the reader’s grasp, undermines
the conventional model of various events building tension toward a climax. It
also conveys the impression that, just as Yossarian is afraid to confront a
life that ends in death, the novel itself is nervous about the passing of time,
which leads inevitably toward death. Breaking up the flow of time is, in a
sense, a narrative attempt to defy mortality. In these early chapters, Dunbar
presents an important alternative to this approach: he knows he is trapped in
linear time, but he hopes to live in it as long as possible by making time move
more slowly in his perception. He thus seeks boredom and discomfort because time
seems to pass more slowly when he is bored or uncomfortable. This separation of
the actual passage of time from the experience of time is an attempt to regain
control of a life constantly threatened by the violence of war.
The novel’s exploration of this quirky
passing of time demonstrates how the novel’s satirical and serious tones
complement each other. Dunbar’s argument about doing unpleasant things because
they make time pass more slowly, a statement that seems entirely illogical and
even comical the first time we read it, begins to make sense as the novel
progresses. The only way in which these soldiers are able to approach the
ludicrous situation in which they have been placed is to indulge their own
ludicrous logic. Dr. Stubbs’s frustrated reflection in
Chapter 10 that the arbitrary nature of death makes it absurd to try
to live makes Dunbar’s ideas about making time last longer seem somewhat
logical: a response to the possibility of imminent death that espouses
self-preservation is no longer comical but rather completely rational.
Part of the reason for
Yossarian’s terror of death is that he has no control over his own fate. Again
and again, the impersonal machine that seems to be running the war in Catch-22 denies
characters the ability to shape their own destinies. The law of Catch-22 seems
to be the embodiment of this trap: even when soldiers can think of rational
reasons to go home from the war, Catch-22 always stops them. A large part of
the powerlessness the men feel comes from the bureaucratic regulations that
prevent rational action; the men’s actions are guided by rules that have little
to do with reality. The hilarious conversations that result from attempting to
stick to the rules are often pitiful because they highlight how inhuman the bureaucracy
is. In Chapter 8, for example, Scheisskopf’s haranguing of Clevinger about
the mode of his address when Clevinger attempts to communicate his innocence
demonstrates how Scheisskopf focuses only on superficial things, such as
matters of propriety, and completely ignores substantial things, such as his
men’s individual needs and feelings.
Summary — Chapter 11: Captain
Black
Captain Black is pleased to hear
that Colonel Cathcart has volunteered the men for the lethal mission of bombing
Bologna. Captain Black hates the men and gloats about their terrifying, violent
task. He is extremely ambitious and had hoped to be promoted to squadron
commander, but when Major Major is picked over him, he lapses into a deep
depression, out of which the Bologna mission lifts him. Captain Black tries to
get revenge on Major Major by initiating the Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade,
during which he forces all the men to swear elaborate oaths of loyalty before
doing basic things like eating meals. He then refuses to let Major Major sign a
loyalty oath and hopes, thereby, to make him appear disloyal. The Glorious
Loyalty Oath Crusade is a major event in the camp until the fearsome Major ——
de Coverley puts an end to it by hollering “Gimme eat!” in the mess hall
without signing an oath.
Summary — Chapter 12: Bologna
It rains interminably before the
Bologna mission, and the bombing run is delayed. The men all hope it will never
stop raining. When it does, Yossarian moves the bomb line on the map so that
the commanding officers will think that Bologna has already been captured.
Yossarian also gives the entire squadron diarrhea by poisoning the food so that
they won’t have to fly. The rain then starts again.
In the meantime,
ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen tries to sell Yossarian a cigarette lighter, competing
with Milo as a black-market trader. He is aghast that Milo has cornered the
entire world market for Egyptian cotton but is unable to sell any of it. The
men are terrified and miserable about having to bomb Bologna. Clevinger and
Yossarian argue about whether Yossarian must bomb Bologna, and, by the middle
of the second week of waiting, everyone in the squadron is as emaciated as
Hungry Joe.
One night, Yossarian, Nately,
and Dunbar go for a drunken drive with Chief White Halfoat; they crash a jeep
and realize that it has stopped raining. Back in the tents, Hungry Joe is
trying to shoot Huple’s cat, which has been giving him nightmares, and the men
force Hungry Joe to fight the cat fairly. The cat runs away, and Hungry Joe is
satisfied. When he goes back to sleep, however, he has another nightmare about
the cat.
Summary — Chapter 13: Major ——
de Coverley
Major —— de Coverley is a
daunting, majestic man with a lion’s mane of white hair, an eagle’s gaze, and a
transparent eye patch. Everyone is afraid of him, and no one will talk to him.
His sole duty is traveling to major cities captured by the Americans to rent
rooms in which his men can take leave; he spends the rest of his time playing
horseshoes. Major —— de Coverley always manages to be photographed with the
first wave of American troops moving into a city, a fact that perplexes both
the enemy and the American commanders. He seems to be a force of nature, and
yet Yossarian is able to fool him by moving the bomb line: Major —— de Coverley
has traveled to enemy-controlled Florence and has not yet returned. The
narrator relates that Milo once approached —— de Coverley on the horseshoe
range, successfully requesting authorization to import eggs on Air Force
planes.
We also learn that Colonel
Cathcart had attempted to give Yossarian a medal some time earlier. When
Yossarian was brave, he had circled over a target twice in order to hit it,
and, on the second pass, Kraft, a younger pilot from the division, had been
killed by shrapnel. Not knowing how to rebuke Yossarian for his foolhardiness,
the authorities decided to stave off criticism by giving him a medal.
Summary — Chapter 14: Kid
Sampson
The squadron finally receives
the go-ahead to bomb Bologna, but by this time Yossarian does not feel like
going over the target even once. He pretends that his plane’s intercom system
is broken and orders his pilot, Kid Sampson, to turn back. They land at the
deserted airfield just before dawn, feeling strangely morose. Yossarian takes a
nap on the beach and wakes up when the planes fly back. Not a single plane has
been hit. Yossarian thinks that cloud cover must have prevented them from
bombing the city and that they will have to make another attempt, but he is
wrong: facing no antiaircraft fire, the Americans bombed the city without
incurring any losses.
Summary — Chapter 15:
Piltchard& Wren
Captain Piltchard and Captain
Wren ineffectually reprimand Yossarian and his crew for turning back and inform
the men that since they missed the ammunition dumps the first time, they will
have to bomb Bologna again. Yossarian confidently flies in, assuming there will
be no antiaircraft fire, and he is stunned when shrapnel begins firing up
toward him through the skies. He furiously directs McWatt into evasive
maneuvers and fights with the strangely cheerful Aarfy until the bombs are
dropped. Yossarian does not die—though many other men in the squadron do—and
the plane lands safely. Yossarian heads immediately for emergency rest leave in
Rome
Summary — Chapter 16: Luciana
Luciana is a beautiful Italian
woman whom Yossarian meets at a bar in Rome. After he buys her dinner and
dances with her, she agrees to sleep with him, but not right then—she will come
to his room the next morning. She does, but then angrily refuses to sleep with
Yossarian until she cleans his room, disgustedly calling him a pig. Finally,
she lets him sleep with her. Afterward, Yossarian falls in love with her and
asks her to marry him. She says she won’t marry him because he is crazy; she
knows he is crazy because no one in his right mind would marry a girl who was
not a virgin. She tells him about a scar she got when the Americans bombed her
town.
Suddenly, Hungry Joe rushes in
with his camera, and Yossarian and Luciana have to get dressed. Laughing, they
go outside, where they part ways. Luciana gives Yossarian her number, telling
him that she expects him to tear it up as soon as she leaves because she thinks
that he is impressed with himself that such a pretty girl would sleep with him
for free. He asks her why on earth he would do such a thing. As soon as she
leaves, though, Yossarian, impressed with himself that such a pretty girl would
sleep with him for free, tears up her number. Almost immediately he regrets
doing so, and, after learning that Colonel Cathcart has raised the number of
missions to forty, he makes the anguished decision to go straight to the
hospital.
Analysis — Chapters 11–16
In this section, the disordered
chronology functions as an instrument for building suspense. The lengthy
digression about the Great Loyalty Oath Crusade interrupts the tense buildup to
the Bologna mission, which occurs shortly before the scene at the beginning of the
novel when the number of required missions is still thirty-five. The Great
Loyalty Oath Crusade story is ironic and funny; the Bologna mission is a dismal
story told in terms of endless rain and growing worry. By breaking off the
Bologna story in the middle to tell the exaggerated parable of the Loyalty Oath
Crusade, Heller heightens the sense of uncertainty and anticipation surrounding
the outcome of the Bologna mission. During the description of the actual
bombing run to Bologna, however, Heller devotes a chapter almost entirely to a
single event, without his usual digressions. This very detailed, vivid account
of the attack makes time appear to move more slowly, trapping the reader in the
same drawn-out terror as the characters. The earnest, straightforward manner in
which the Bologna story is told is a signal that we are meant to take this
episode seriously—that there is nothing funny about this aspect of war.
Although Catch-22 is
written mostly from the perspective of a third-person narrator who describes
what each of the characters is thinking, we hear mostly what is happening in
Yossarian’s mind, and many of the observations about the absurdity of the war
seem to be his own. So, despite the fact that each chapter of Catch-22 bears
the name of a character described in that chapter, the narrative generally
returns to Yossarian. A significant departure from this organizational method
occurs in the chapter entitled “Bologna,” however: instead of operating as a
largely humorous description of the nature and history of one of the novel’s
characters, this chapter remains almost entirely in the present of the story,
and Yossarian is forced to confront his desire to live at the expense of
everything else. The chapter title itself—a place name rather than a person’s
name—marks a shift from a satirical and humorous focus on the unwitting
characters engaged in the war to a serious focus on the present realities of
the war.
Yossarian’s vague guilt about
abandoning his friends reveals a weakness in his philosophy of self-preservation:
he seems to have no qualms about abandoning the mission and thereby keeping
himself alive, but he does care about his friends and feels a mild trepidation
while he awaits their return. Up to this point, Yossarian’s sole goal in life
has been survival at the expense of everything else: he has subjected himself
and his squadron to various illnesses, refused to enjoy fruit because it might
make him healthy, and endured rather unpleasant hospital stays—all for the sake
of not having to fly missions. Yossarian faces a dilemma: on one hand, caring
for others is destructive in that it undermines his ability to try to save his
own life; on the other hand, caring for others is the only thing that mitigates
the impersonal hatred that Yossarian perceives directed toward him.
The interlude with Luciana
provides a welcome respite from life in the camp on Pianosa, but it also
illustrates the strain placed on male-female relationships by the war. Luciana
and Yossarian seem legitimately drawn to one another, but their relationship is
brief and almost wholly sexual. Hungry Joe’s interruption of their time
together demonstrates the glaring lack of privacy in Yossarian’s life and
highlights the difficulty of having meaningful relationships in wartime.
Similarly, Yossarian’s tearing up of Luciana’s number constitutes an act of
irrational, self-satisfied exuberance that seems part and parcel of the absurd
ironies forced on him by the Catch-22 mentality of the war. He is so
overwhelmed at the end of this section—after Bologna, after Luciana, and after
he learns that the number of missions has been raised yet again—that he decides
to check into the hospital, a place of relative sanity and safety.
Summary — Chapter 17: The
Soldier in White
He wondered often how he would
ever recognize . . . the vocal slip, loss of balance or lapse of memory that
would signal the inevitable beginning of the inevitable end
Yossarian has returned to the
hospital, where he finds life (and death) more palatable than in his recurring
memories of being on a bomb run with Snowden dying in the back, whispering,
“I’m cold.” At the hospital, death is orderly and polite, and there is no
inexplicable violence. Dunbar is in the hospital with Yossarian, and they are
both perplexed by the soldier in white, a man completely covered in plaster
bandages. The men in the hospital discuss the injustice of mortality—some men
are killed and some are not, and some men get sick and some do not, without any
pattern or logic. Sometime earlier, Clevinger had tried to explain why there
might be some justice in such illogical deaths, but Yossarian was too busy
keeping track of all the forces trying to kill him to listen. Later, Yossarian
and Hungry Joe collected lists of fatal diseases that they can claim to have. Doc
Daneeka, however, frequently refuses to ground them even when they claim to
have these diseases. The doctor tells Yossarian that after Yossarian flies his
fifty-five missions he will think about helping Yossarian.
Summary — Chapter 18: The
Soldier Who Saw Everything Twice
The first time Yossarian ever
goes to the hospital, he is still a private. He fakes abdominal pain, but when
the doctors decide he has been cured, he pretends to have the mysterious
ailment of another soldier in the ward who says he “sees everything twice.” He
spends Thanksgiving in the hospital and vows to spend all future Thanksgivings
there, but he breaks that oath when he spends the next Thanksgiving in bed with
Lieutenant Scheisskopf’s wife, arguing about God. After Yossarian claims he is
cured of seeing everything twice, he is asked to pretend to be a dying soldier
whose mother, father, and brother have come to visit him. The family, which has
traveled to visit their family member, does not know that he died that morning.
The doctors bandage Yossarian, who pretends to be the dying soldier. The
soldier’s father asks Yossarian to tell God that it is not right for men to die
so young.
Summary — Chapter 19: Colonel
Cathcart
Haven’t you got anything
humorous that stays away from . . . God? I’d like to keep away from the subject
of religion altogether if we can.
The ambitious Colonel Cathcart
browbeats the chaplain, demanding a prayer before each bombing run, an idea he
takes from the -Saturday Evening Post. He then abandons the
idea after the chaplain suggests that God might punish them for not including
the enlisted men. The chaplain timidly mentions that some of the men have
complained about Colonel Cathcart’s habit of raising the number of missions
required every few weeks, but Colonel Cathcart ignores him.
Summary — Chapter 20: Corporal
Whitcomb
On his way home, the chaplain
meets Colonel Korn, Colonel Cathcart’s wily, cynical sidekick. Colonel Korn
mocks Colonel Cathcart in front of the chaplain and is highly suspicious of a
plum tomato that Colonel Cathcart offered the chaplain. At his tent in the
woods, the chaplain encounters the hostile Corporal Whitcomb, his atheistic
assistant, who resents him deeply for holding back his career. Corporal
Whitcomb tells the chaplain that a C.I.D. man suspects the chaplain of signing
Washington Irving’s name to official papers and of stealing plum tomatoes. The
poor chaplain is very unhappy, because he feels helpless to improve anyone’s
life.
Summary — Chapter 21: General
Dreedle
Colonel Cathcart has become
preoccupied with Yossarian’sbehavior—particularly his complaints about the
number of required missions and the fact that he appeared naked at his medal
ceremony shortly after Snowden’s death. Yossarian had refused to wear clothes
to the ceremony because Snowden, dying in the back of the plane, had bled all
over him, and Yossarian never wanted to wear a uniform again. Yossarian is also
responsible for a moaning epidemic at the briefing before the Avignon mission
during which Snowden was killed; he started moaning because the mission’s
dangers meant that he might never again sleep with a beautiful woman.
Colonel Cathcart wishes he knew
how to solve the problem posed by Yossarian’s mischief, for this would impress
General Dreedle, Cathcart’s commanding officer. General Dreedle, however, does
not care what his men do, as long as they remain alive in reliable military
quantities. He travels everywhere with a buxom nurse and worries mostly about
Colonel Moodus, his son-in-law, whom he despises and thus occasionally asks
Chief White Halfoat to punch in the nose. The narrator relates that Colonel
Korn once tried to undercut Colonel Cathcart by giving a flamboyant briefing to
impress General Dreedle; General Dreedle, unimpressed, told Colonel Cathcart
that Colonel Korn made him sick
Analysis — Chapters 17–21
In Catch-22, the
hospital is certainly not a place where heroic doctors heal grateful patients,
but Yossarian’s ridiculous experience in this chapter goes so far as to parody
the idea of a hospital as a place where death can be confronted and properly
mourned. For Yossarian, the hospital is nothing more than a refuge from the
atrocities that occur outside its walls, and he is unable to understand why a
family would want to arrive at a hospital to watch their son die. The hospital
staff further parodies the hospital as a site of grief by requesting that
Yossarian pretend to be a dying soldier for the sake of a family whose real son
has already passed away. Adding somber draperies and stinking flowers to the
room, the hospital is as unable as the rest of the bureaucracy to take death
seriously, and the family members who do mourn their son’s or brother’s passing
are comically portrayed as overly sentimental. While one might expect that a
war would underline the fragility of life and make those involved appreciate
ritual celebrations of life and mourning of death all the more, in Catch-22 the
war numbs these characters to the effects of death, which has become a mundane,
daily occurrence. As a result, the actions of those who still take death
seriously are incomprehensible or meaningless to those involved in the war.
Heller’s statement, however, is not that life is meaningless;
it would be a mistake to assume that Yossarian’s attitude or the doctors’
attitudes toward death are Heller’s own. Rather, it seems that the novel’s
purpose in displaying such an unconventional portrait of mourning is to show
the absurd behavior that war forces humans to adopt—reaching a point where not
even the loss of life is impressive.
In one of the novel’s manifold
contradictions, two atheists, Yossarian and Mrs. Scheisskopf, argue over what
kind of God they do not believe in and address the nature of God in a debate.
The God in whom Mrs. Scheisskopf does not believe is good and all-knowing,
whereas Yossarian’s deity is bumbling and confused. Yossarian’s argument is
typical: that a truly compassionate God would not have allowed all the unpleasantness
and pain in the world. But the details that Yossarian uses to argue his point
are unusual: he asks why God would create phlegm, tooth decay, or incontinence.
Yossarian is not just angry with the God that he does not believe in, but he
also ridicules him. Mrs. Scheisskopf, on the other hand, prefers not to believe
in a good and righteous God, arguing that if one is not going to believe in
God, one might as well not believe in a good God. In this way, the idea of God
can be useful, even if it is not accurate. The contrast between the chaplain
and his assistant, the atheist Corporal Whitcomb, further develops this
paradox. The chaplain, who does believe in God, has a very quiet, nonintrusive
manner as he ministers to the men in the squadron, which does not turn many men
toward religion. Corporal Whitcomb, on the other hand, wants to enter into a
full-scale religious campaign, which would include revivals and form letters
sent from the chaplain to the families of men killed in combat. Like Mrs.
Scheisskopf, Whitcomb’s lack of belief in God allows him to see religion as a
useful tool.
The ambitious, foolish, and
compulsive Colonel Cathcart dominates the second half of this section, which
focuses on the dehumanizing power of bureaucracy. Colonel Cathcart wants to be
a general, for no reason other than that he is not a general now. His ludicrous
tallying of black eyes and feathers in his cap would be amusing if it did not
directly result in his unfailing willingness to risk his men’s lives. As it is,
Colonel Cathcart is only sickeningly amusing. When Chapter 21 reveals that he
does not have a chance of becoming a general, his arbitrary increase of the
number of missions his men must fly seems even more meaningless. The poor,
ineffectual chaplain wants very much to help Yossarian and his friends, but all
his moral convictions are frail and flimsy before the unanswerable authority of
men like Cathcart and Korn.
The chaplain’s sensation of déjÃ
vu reminds us that in the disordered temporal structure of Heller’s story, some
events do happen twice. But the chaplain defines his déjà vu not in terms of
time but as “the subtle, recurring confusion between illusion and reality”—a
confusion that becomes quite serious in these chapters. Yossarian, for example,
constructs illusory sicknesses, but doctors are inexplicably unable or
unwilling to tell the difference between real and artificial sickness.
Frequently, these sicknesses take on the illusory nature of performances. In
Chapter 18, Yossarian’s admiration for the performance of the man who sees
everything twice leads him to imitate that performance. When the man dies in
the night, however, Yossarian does not acknowledge the authenticity of the
man’s sickness; instead, he decides that the man took his performance too far. To
avoid encountering the ultimate realities of the war—death, pain, and
fighting—the men create illusions that blur the lines between what is real and
what is not.
Summary — Chapter 22: Milo the
Mayor
The enigmatic references to
Snowden’s death are finally cleared up; Snowden’s death is the moment at which
Yossarian loses his nerve. Flying a mission after Colonel Korn’s extravagant
briefing, Snowden is killed when Dobbs goes crazy and seizes the plane’s
controls from Huple. As he dies, Snowden pleads for Yossarian’s help, saying he
is cold. Dobbs is a terrible pilot and a wreck of a man; he later tells
Yossarian that he plans to kill Colonel Cathcart before he raises the required
number of missions again. Dobbs sees this action as the only way to respond to Cathcart’s
foolhardiness. When he asks for Yossarian’s approval, Yossarian is unable to
give it, and Dobbs abandons his plan.
The narrator then describes an
episode in which Orr, Yossarian, and Milo take a trip to stock up on supplies.
As they travel, Orr and Yossarian gradually realize the extent of Milo’s
control over the black market and his vast international influence: he is the
mayor of Palermo, the assistant governor-general of Malta, the vice-shah of
Oran, the caliph of Baghdad, the imam of Damascus, the sheik of Araby, and is
worshipped as a god in parts of Africa. Every region has embraced him because
he has revitalized their economies with his syndicate, in which everybody has a
share. Nevertheless, throughout their trip, Orr and Yossarian are forced to
sleep in the plane while Milo enjoys lavish palaces, and they are finally
awakened in the middle of the night so that Milo can rush his shipment of red
bananas to their next stop.
Summary — Chapter 23: Nately’s
Old Man
One evening, Nately finds his whore
in Rome again after a long search. He tries to convince Yossarian and Aarfy to
take two of her friends for thirty dollars each. Aarfyobjects, stating that he
has never had to pay for sex. Nately’s whore is sick of Nately and begins to
swear at him. Hungry Joe arrives, and the group abandons Aarfy and goes to the
apartment building where the girls live. Here the men find a seemingly endless
flow of naked young women, and Hungry Joe is torn between taking in the scene
and rushing back for his camera. Nately argues about nationalism and moral duty
with an old man who lives in the building: the old man claims Italy is doing
better than America in the war because, as Italy has already been occupied,
Italians are no longer being killed. He then points out that even America
probably won’t last as long as frogs, which have been around for five hundred
million years. The patriotic, idealistic Nately argues somewhat haltingly for
America’s international supremacy and the values it represents. But he is
troubled by the fact that the old man reminds him of his father. Nately’s whore
tortures Nately with her indifference, eventually abandoning him and going to
bed while he argues with the old man. When Nately finally does get to sleep
with his whore the next morning, her little sister almost immediately
interrupts them.
Summary — Chapter 24: Milo
By April, Milo’s influence is
massive: He controls the international black market, plays a major role in the
world economy, and uses air force planes from countries all over the world to
carry his supply shipments. The planes are repainted with an “M & M
Enterprises” logo, but Milo continues to insist that everybody has a share in
his syndicate. Milo contracts with the Americans to bomb the Germans and with
the Germans to shoot down American planes. German antiaircraft guns contracted
by Milo even shot down Mudd, the dead man in Yossarian’s tent, for which
Yossarian holds a grudge against Milo. Milo wants Yossarian’s help to concoct a
solution for unloading his massive holdings of Egyptian cotton, which he cannot
sell and which threaten to ruin his entire operation. One evening after dinner,
Milo’s planes begin to bomb Milo’s own camp: he has landed another contract
with the Germans, and dozens of men are wounded and killed during the attack.
Almost everyone wants to end M & M Enterprises right then, but Milo shows
them how much money they have all made, and almost all of the survivors forgive
him. While Yossarian sits naked in a tree watching Snowden’s funeral, Milo
seeks him out to talk to him about the cotton. He gives Yossarian some
chocolate-covered cotton and tries to convince him it is really candy.
Yossarian tells Milo to ask the government to buy his cotton, and Milo is
struck by the intelligence of the idea.
Summary — Chapter 25: The
Chaplain
The chaplain is troubled that no
one seems to treat him as a regular human being and everyone is uncomfortable
in his presence. Furthermore, he is intimidated by the soldiers and generally
ineffectual as a religious leader. He grows increasingly miserable and is
sustained solely by the religious visions he has seen since his arrival,
including the vision of the naked man in the tree at Snowden’s funeral. (The
naked man was, of course, Yossarian.) He dreams of his wife and children dying
horribly in his absence. He tries to see Major Major about the number of
missions the men are asked to fly but, like everyone else, finds that Major
Major will not allow him into his office except when he is out. On the way to
see Major Major a second time, the chaplain encounters Flume, Chief White
Halfoat’s old roommate, who is so afraid of having his throat slit while he
sleeps that he has begun living in the forest. The chaplain then learns that
Colonel Cathcart has promoted Corporal Whitcomb to sergeant for an idea that
the colonel believes will land him in the Saturday Evening Post. The
chaplain tries to mingle with the men at the officers’ club, but Colonel
Cathcart periodically throws him out. The chaplain begins doubting everything,
even God.
Summary — Chapter 26: Aarfy
The night Nately falls in love
with his whore, she sits naked from the waist down in a room full of enlisted
men playing blackjack. None of the enlisted men is interested except Nately,
but she eventually gets sick of him and refuses to accept the money he offers
her to stay. Aarfy calls her a slut, and Nately is deeply offended. Aarfy is
the navigator of the flight on which Yossarian is finally hit by flak;
Yossarian is wounded in the leg and taken to the hospital, where he and Dunbar
change identities by ordering lower-ranking men to trade beds with them. Dunbar
pretends to be A. Fortiori. Finally, they are caught by Nurse Cramer and Nurse
Duckett, who takes Yossarian by the ear and puts him back to bed.
Analysis — Chapters 22–26
The bombing run during which
Snowden dies has been alluded to for several chapters, but the details have
never been fully explained. The beginning of Chapter 22 provides a few of those
details and underlines the narrative importance of the event. The novel’s incessant
references to the incident have two narrative purposes. First, they emphasize
the narrative’s circular chronological organization. The event that has so
traumatized Yossarian does not recede into the past as Yossarian moves through
time; rather, he continually returns to it, unable to escape. Second, the
constant references to Snowden’s death build up suspense, making the Avignon
mission one of the novel’s climaxes. Even though this mission occurs
chronologically before many other events in the novel, we have to wait until
almost the end of the novel to find out exactly what happened on the mission.
By telling his story out of chronological order, Heller can place whatever
climactic events he wants at the end of the novel since he is not bound by temporal
restraints.
The bombing of Avignon is just
one of the many ways in which this section continues to show Yossarian’s
attempt to hold onto his life and his humanity in the face of the war. The
chaplain struggles similarly in this section to remain sane despite his
nightmarish life. The chaplain is treated as an outsider by everyone, doubts
the moral standards that have governed his life, and endures horrible fantasies
of his wife and children dying violent deaths. Just as the idea of the hospital
as a place for respectfully coming to terms with death is undermined in the
previous section, the idea of the chaplain as a source of spiritual stability
and reason in the face of a disorienting and upsetting war is undermined in
this section.
Milo Minderbinder is one of the
most complex figures in the novel, and the syndicate that he heads is one of
its most elusive symbols. On the one hand, the syndicate allows Heller to
parody the economic activity of large-market capitalism. The extraordinary
rationalization by which Milo can buy eggs for seven cents apiece and sell them
for five cents apiece while still turning a profit is one of the most
tortuously sublime moments in the novel, even if it makes only shaky economic
sense. Milo claims that at every stage he actually buys and sells the eggs to
his own syndicate, thereby somehow retaining the money that he spends to buy
the eggs. But, if he buys the eggs with the same resources that he bolsters by
selling the eggs, all he is doing is moving money from one place to another. We
can easily reduce the bizarre logic that governs Milo’s syndicate to nonsense
because we understand the impossibility of Milo’s money-making scheme. Yet,
though it is completely illogical and unjustifiable, like many concepts in the
novel, Milo’s syndicate does make money. Whether or not the logic makes sense
is irrelevant; the end result defies those who try to explain the process.
The syndicate also represents an
almost socialist collectivity—in this enterprise governed by amoral expediency,
“everybody has a share.” In this light, the syndicate becomes almost a parody
of communism as well as capitalism: it is nominally a collective governed by
all but is actually run by a single despot. The economic rationalization of the
syndicate resembles the moral rationalization of a dehumanized collective,
which might agree that it is in everybody’s best interest for Milo to bomb his
own squadron and kill, wound, and maim a number of his fellow soldiers.
Heller creates tension between
Yossarian’s feelings about Milo and our feelings about Milo. Yossarian is
undeniably the moral compass of the novel, and he seems to like Milo, which
suggests that we too should sympathize with him. But Milo is continually
presented as a threatening figure. While Yossarian sits naked in the tree at
Snowden’s funeral in a highly biblical scene, Milo almost seems like the
serpent in the Garden of Eden, there to tempt the innocent with
chocolate-covered cotton and the promise of a fast buck.
The absurd proportions of Milo’s
empire clue us in to an aspect of Catch-22 that, until this
section, has been rather subtle: the novel’s element of hyperbole. Despite
their ridiculous names, all the men in Yossarian’s squadron might possibly have
lived during WWII. Milo, however, is a completely impossible figure. All along,
Heller has created minor absurdities, such as the way the soldier in white has
the fluids from his groin directed right back into his IV drip. In this
section, he creates a major absurdity in the vastness of Milo’s domain, which
allows us to know with absolute certainty that Catch-22 is
intended more as an allegory than as a realistic portrait of army life.
Summary — Chapter 27: Nurse
Duckett
The next morning, while Nurse
Duckett is smoothing the sheets at the foot of his bed, Yossarian thrusts his
hand up her skirt. She shrieks and rushes away, and Dunbar grabs her bosom from
behind. When a furious doctor finally rescues her, Yossarian tries to plead
insanity—he says that he has a recurring dream about a fish. He is assigned an
appointment with Major Sanderson, the hospital psychiatrist. Sanderson,
however, is more interested in discussing his own problems than Yossarian’s.
Yossarian’s friends visit him in the hospital, Dobbs again offers to kill
Colonel Cathcart, and, finally, after Yossarian admits that he thinks that
people are trying to kill him and that he has not adjusted to the war, Major
Sanderson decides that Yossarian really is crazy and should be sent home. But,
because of the identity mix-up perpetrated by Yossarian and Dunbar earlier in
their hospital stay, there is a mistake, and A. Fortiori is sent home instead.
Furious, Yossarian goes to see Doc Daneeka, but Doc Daneeka will not ground
Yossarian for his insanity, rhetorically asking who would fight if all the
crazy men got sent home.
Summary – Chapter 28: Dobbs
Yossarian goes to see Dobbs and
tells him to go ahead and kill Colonel Cathcart. But Dobbs has finished his sixty
missions and is waiting to be sent home; he no longer has a reason to kill
Colonel Cathcart. When Yossarian says that Colonel Cathcart will simply raise
the number of missions again, Dobbs says that he will wait and see but that
perhaps Orr would help Yossarian kill the colonel. Orr crashed his plane again
while Yossarian was in the hospital and was fished out of the ocean—none of the
life jackets in his plane worked because Milo took out the carbon dioxide tanks
to use for making ice cream sodas. Now, Orr is tinkering with the stove that he
is trying to build in his and Yossarian’s tent, and he suggests that Yossarian
try flying a mission with him for practice in case he ever has to make a crash
landing. Yossarian broods about the rumored second mission to Bologna. Orr is
making noise and irritating him, and Yossarian imagines killing him, which
Yossarian finds a relaxing thought. They talk about women—Orr says they do not
like Yossarian, and Yossarian replies that they are crazy. Orr tells Yossarian
that he knows Yossarian has asked not to fly with him, and he offers to tell
Yossarian why a naked girl was hitting him with her shoe outside Nately’s
whore’s little sister’s room in Rome. Yossarian laughingly declines. The next
time Orr flies a mission, he again crashes his plane into the ocean. This time,
his survival raft drifts away from the others and he disappears.
Summary — Chapter 29: Peckem
The men are dismayed when they
learn that General Peckem has transferred Scheisskopf, now a colonel, to his staff.
Peckem is pleased because he thinks the move will increase his strength
compared to that of his rival, General Dreedle. Colonel Scheisskopf is dismayed
by the news that he cannot bring his wife along and that he will no longer be
able to conduct parades every afternoon. Scheisskopf immediately irritates his
colleagues in Group Headquarters, and Peckem takes him along for an inspection
of Colonel Cathcart’s squadron briefing. At the preliminary briefing, the men
are displeased to learn that they will be bombing an undefended village into
rubble; they don’t know that the only purpose of the missions is to impress
General Peckem with the clean aerial photography enabled by their bomb
patterns. When Peckem and Scheisskopf arrive, Cathcart becomes angry that
another colonel has appeared to rival him. He gives the briefing himself, and,
though he feels shaky and lacks confidence, he makes it through and
congratulates himself on a job well done under pressure.
Summary — Chapter 30: Dunbar
On the bombing run, Yossarian
has a flashback to the mission during which Snowden died, and he panics. When
McWatt starts pulling daredevil stunts, he threatens to kill McWatt if he does
not follow orders. He is worried that McWatt will hold a grudge, but, after the
mission, McWatt seems concerned only about Yossarian’s health. Yossarian has
begun seeing Nurse Duckett, and he enjoys making love to her on the beach.
Sometimes, while they sit looking at the ocean, Yossarian thinks about all the
people who have died underwater, including Orr and Clevinger. One day, McWatt
is buzzing the beach in his plane as a joke, when he accidentally flies too low
and the propeller slices Kid Sampson in half. Kid Sampson’s body splatters all
over the beach. Back at the base, everyone is occupied with the disaster;
McWatt, meanwhile, does not land his plane but keeps flying higher and higher.
Yossarian runs down the runway yelling at McWatt to come down, but he knows
what McWatt is going to do. McWatt crashes his plane into the side of a
mountain, killing himself. Colonel Cathcart is so upset that he raises the
number of missions to sixty-five.
Summary — Chapter 31: Mrs.
Daneeka
When Colonel Cathcart learns
that Doc Daneeka was also killed in the crash, he raises the number of missions
to seventy. Actually, Doc Daneeka was not killed in the crash, but the
records—which Doc Daneeka, hating to fly, bribed Yossarian to alter—maintain
that the doctor was in the plane with McWatt, collecting some flight time. Doc
Daneeka is surprised to hear that he is dead, and his wife in America, who
receives a letter to that effect from the military, is shattered. Heroically,
she is cheered to learn that she will be receiving a number of monthly payments
from various military departments for the rest of her life, as well as sizable
life insurance payments from her husband’s insurance company. Husbands of her
friends begin to flirt with her, and she dyes her hair.
In Pianosa, Doc Daneeka is
ostracized by the men, who blame him for the increased number of missions they
are required to fly. He is no longer allowed to practice medicine and realizes
that, in one sense, he really is dead. He sends a passionate letter to his
wife, begging her to alert the authorities that he is still alive. She
considers the possibility, but after receiving a form letter from Colonel
Cathcart expressing regret over her husband’s death, she moves her children to
Lansing, Michigan, and leaves no forwarding address
Analysis — Chapters 27–31
This section works through an
increasingly macabre surrealism that climaxes with the manslaughter of Kid
Sampson and suicide of McWatt. The strange psychological examinations and
identity games in the hospital provide Heller with the opportunity to parody
modern psychotherapy, which he does with scathing cleverness—Major Sanderson’s
insistence on discussing his own late puberty is one of the funniest
characterizations in the novel. It also lends some weight to the idea of
insanity that circulates throughout the novel; the men are always accusing each
other of being crazy, and Yossarian even finds insanity a desirable trait,
because it will get him out of the war—or would, if not for Catch-22.
Although the novel does not seem
to follow a chronological pattern—being composed primarily of episodes that are
memories, flashbacks, or character descriptions and having very little grasp on
what exactly the current moment is—the climax of these three chapters
demonstrates that the novel as a whole still has a somewhat conventional
narrative shape. That is, the memories and flashbacks that make up the first
two-thirds of the novel lead up to the fatigue and frustration with war that
form the background for the events in these chapters. The war transitions from
a surreal series of events whose absurdity can be lightly parodied to a reality
that is a serious and heavy weight on Yossarian and his squadron. Furthermore,
the events in these chapters—particularly the two deaths—shift the narrative
from the brilliant parody of the preceding sections into an extremely dark
humor that borders on seriousness. The increasing strain the war is placing on
Yossarian’s psyche is evident in the scene in which he contemplates murdering
Orr and finds the idea a relaxing one; it is this thought alone that allows him
to tolerate his roommate’s prattling.
Orr’s disappearance and presumed
death come as something of a shock. In fact, one of the most remarkable aspects
of Catch-22 is the way that Heller manages to catch us off
guard each time one of Yossarian’s friends dies. In part, this aspect is a
virtue of the novel’s chronology—with so much jumping forward and backward in
time, it becomes easy to think of the lives of the characters as existing in a
sort of vacuum, without beginning or end. Of course, such is not the case, and
the men’s deaths are sharp reminders that even in the novel time moves forward
and people are fragile. Yossarian is not in need of such a reminder: he is haunted
by the death of Snowden and reaches a moment of murderous rage toward McWatt
shortly after flashing back to Snowden’s death. Yossarian’s fierce desire to
live makes him seem heroic even in his moments of cowardice. As he strangles
McWatt and yells at him to pull up, it seems only just for McWatt to obey.
The absurd chapter on the death
of Doc Daneeka represents perhaps the most extreme moment of bureaucratic
confusion in the entire novel. Paperwork has the power to make a living man
officially dead, and the bureaucracy would rather lose the man than try to
confront the forms. Painfully, Mrs. Daneeka becomes complicit in her husband’s
red-tape murder when she decides to take the insurance payments as a higher
authority than his own letter protesting that he is really alive. Doc Daneeka
thus realizes that he is essentially dead and that death is a matter of
paperwork rather than biology. The soldiers’ powerlessness over their own lives
extends even to their own deaths, which can be forced upon them not only by the
shooting of a gun but also by the fall of a stamp.
Summary — Chapter 32: Yo-Yo’s
Roomies
The cold weather comes, and Kid
Sampson’s legs remain on the beach, since no one will retrieve them. The first
things Yossarian remembers when he wakes up each morning are Kid Sampson’s legs
and Snowden. When Orr never returns, four new roommates, a group of shiny-faced
twenty-one-year-olds who have never seen combat, join Yossarian. They clown
around, calling him“Yo-Yo,” rousing in him a murderous hatred. Yossarian tries
to persuade Chief White Halfoat to move in with them and scare the new officers
away, but Halfoat has decided to move into the hospital to die of pneumonia.
Yossarian begins to feel more protective toward the men, but they then burn
Orr’s birch logs and suddenly move Mudd’s belongings out of the tent—the dead
man who has lived there for so long is abruptly gone. Yossarian panics and
flees to Rome with Hungry Joe the day before Nately’s whore enjoys a good
night’s sleep and wakes the next morning to discover that she is in love
Summary — Chapter 33: Nately’s
Whore
In Rome, Yossarian misses Nurse
Duckett and goes searching in vain for Luciana. He accompanies Nately on a
mission to rescue his whore from some army officers who will not let her leave
their hotel room. After the rescue and a good night’s sleep, Nately’s whore
falls deeply in love with Nately, and they languish in bed together until her
little sister dives in with them. Nately begins to have wild fantasies of
moving his whore and her sister back to America and bringing the sister up like
his own child, but when his whore hears that he no longer wants her to go out
hustling, she becomes furious and an argument ensues. The other men try to
intervene, and Nately tries to convince them that they can all move to the same
suburb and work for his father. He tries to forbid his whore from ever speaking
again to the old man in the whore’s hotel, and she becomes even angrier. But
she still misses Nately when he leaves, and she is furious with Yossarian when
he punches Nately in the face and breaks his nose.
Summary — Chapter 34:
Thanksgiving
Yossarian breaks Nately’s nose
on Thanksgiving after Milo gets all the men drunk on bottles of cheap whiskey.
Yossarian goes to bed early but wakes up to the sound of machine-gun fire. At
first he is terrified, but he quickly realizes that a group of men are firing
machine guns as a prank. Furious, he takes his gun to exact revenge. Nately
tries to stop him, and Yossarian breaks his nose. Nately is in the hospital the
next morning, and Yossarian feels terribly guilty for having broken his nose.
They encounter the chaplain in the hospital. He has lied in order to be
admitted, claiming to have a disease called Wisconsin shingles. He can now feel
wonderful since he has learned how to rationalize vice into virtue. Suddenly,
the soldier in white is wheeled into the room, and Dunbar panics. Dunbar begins
screaming, and soon everyone in the ward begins screaming as well. Nurse
Duckett warns Yossarian that she overheard some doctors talking about how they
planned to “disappear” Dunbar. Yossarian goes to warn his friend but cannot
find him.
Summary — Chapter 35: Milo the
Militant
When Chief White Halfoat finally
dies of pneumonia and Nately finishes his seventy missions, Yossarian begs
Nately not to volunteer to fly more than seventy missions. But Nately does not
want to be sent home until he can take his whore with him. Yossarian asks for
help from Milo, who immediately goes to see Colonel Cathcart about having
himself assigned to more combat missions. Milo has finally been exposed as the
tyrannical fraud he is. He has no intention of giving anyone a real share of
the syndicate, but his power and influence are at their peak and everyone
admires him. He pretends to feel guilty for not doing his duty—flying
missions—and connivingly asks the deferential Colonel Cathcart to assign him to
more dangerous combat duties. Milo tells Colonel Cathcart that someone else
will have to run the syndicate, and Colonel Cathcart volunteers himself and
Colonel Korn. When Milo explains the complex operations of the business to
Cathcart, the colonel, falling into Milo’s logical traps, declares Milo the
only man who could possibly run it and forbids Milo from flying another combat
mission. He suggests that he might make the other men fly Milo’s missions for
him, and if one of those men wins a medal, Milo will get the medal. To make his
plan possible, he says, he will ratchet the number of required missions up to
eighty. The next morning, the alarm sounds, and the men fly off on a mission
that turns out to be particularly deadly. Twelve men are killed, including
Dobbs and Nately.
Summary — Chapter 36: The Cellar
The chaplain is devastated by
Nately’s death, which he learns about at the airfield where the men are
returning from their mission. Suddenly, the chaplain is dragged away by a group
of military police who accuse him of an unspecified crime. A colonel accuses
the chaplain of forgery and interrogates him. His only evidence is a letter
that Yossarian forged in the hospital and signed with the chaplain’s name some
time ago. He then accuses the chaplain of stealing the plum tomato from Colonel
Cathcart and of being Washington Irving. The men in the room idiotically find
him guilty of unspecified crimes they assume he has committed and then order
him to go about his business while they think of a way to punish him. The
chaplain leaves and furiously goes to confront Colonel Korn about the number of
missions the men are required to fly. He tells Colonel Korn that he plans to
bring the matter directly to General Dreedle’s attention, but the colonel replies
gleefully that General Peckem has replaced General Dreedle as wing commander.
He then tells the chaplain that he and Colonel Cathcart can make the men fly as
many missions as they want to make them fly—they have even transferred Dr.
Stubbs, who had offered to ground any man with more than seventy missions, to
the Pacific.
Summary — Chapter 37: General
Scheisskopf
General Peckem’s victory sours
quickly. On his first day in charge of General Dreedle’s old operation, he
learns that Scheisskopf has been promoted to lieutenant general and is now the
commanding officer for all combat operations. He is in charge of General Peckem
and his entire group, and he intends to make every single man present march in
parades.
Analysis — Chapters 32–37
The first part of this section,
with Yossarian’s young roommates and the story of Nately’s whore, returns to
the high comedy of the earlier parts of the novel, but with the important
difference that Yossarian is on the edge of a breakdown and seems to know it.
Orr’s disappearance is a very hard blow, and Yossarian is now plagued by
thoughts of death and dismemberment. The high comedy comes to an abrupt and
unexpected halt with the eerie return of the soldier in white, which is
followed immediately by Dunbar’s unexplained disappearance and the deaths of
Chief White Halfoat, Nately, and Dobbs. The squadron is beginning to fall
apart, and even the military bureaucracy is being turned on its thick head by
the sudden ousting of General Dreedle in favor of General Peckem, who immediately
learns that General Scheisskopf is now his superior officer. Furthermore,
Scheisskopf’s intention for everyone under his command to march in parades is a
ludicrous juxtaposition of irrelevant discipline-building exercises with the
realities of war.
As Yossarian’s story moves
toward its climax, the sense of unknown danger approaching from all sides
intensifies markedly, from gunfire in the dark to the disappearance of Dunbar
to the chaplain’s sudden, disconcerting interrogation for an unspecified crime.
(This scene is reminiscent of the scene in Franz Kafka’s The Trial, in
which the novel’s protagonist wakes one morning to find himself accused of a
crime whose nature no one will describe to him.) The illogical nature of the
chaplain’s interrogation makes it so terrifying. If he were accused of a
specific crime, or if his interrogators were willing to listen to a word he
said, the chaplain would have at least some power over his situation. As it is,
all his attempts to clear his name are met with the same illogical arguments,
and he can do absolutely nothing; he realizes that his captors could beat him
to death if they wanted to and he couldn’t stop them. The chaplain’s plight is
similar to that of all the men in the squadron: their lives are in the hands of
others, and their logical desire to go free because they are innocent is
meaningless in a world without logic.
Another highly restrictive force
surrounding the squadron is the fact that no goal seems to be achievable. As
soon as the men complete their missions, the required number is raised; as soon
as Orr finishes building his stove, he is shot down and disappears; as soon as
Nately’s whore falls in love with him, he is killed in combat. It seems almost
miraculous that the men have it in them to try to accomplish anything, let
alone the thankless task of bombing enemies they have never seen, when almost
any action taken to alter the status quo has very negative consequences.
However, Heller always stops just short of criticizing the war itself—it would be
difficult to argue that fighting Hitler is wrong. Instead, he criticizes
the way in which the war is carried out.
This section is also one of the
only long sequences of chapters told in straight linear time—the same timeline,
in fact, that leads right to the end of the novel. Heller uses this long
chronological sequence to enhance the sense of momentum building toward a
climax. The orderly progression of time corresponds to an increasing disorder
in Yossarian’s world: the helplessness and lack of control that the men feel
spirals to a fever pitch. As things fall apart all around Yossarian, the novel
takes on the feel of a moving walkway, leading inexorably toward an
unspecified, ominous ending
Summary — Chapter 38: Kid Sister
Yossarian marches around backward
so that no one can sneak up behind him, and he refuses to fly in any more
combat missions. When informed of Yossarian’s defiance, Colonel Cathcart and
Colonel Korn decide to take pity on Yossarian for the death of his friend
Nately and send him to Rome to rest. In Rome, he breaks the news of Nately’s
death to Nately’s whore, who tries to kill him with a potato peeler for
bringing her the bad news. Her kid sister materializes and also tries to stab
him. Covered with stab wounds, Yossarian goes to a Red Cross building to get
cleaned up. When he emerges, Nately’s whore is waiting in ambush and tries to
stab him again. She follows him everywhere, even back to Pianosa, but he
retaliates by flying her to a distant location and dropping her in a parachute
from the plane. Yossarian still walks around backward, and, as word spreads
that he has refused to fly more combat missions, men begin to approach him at
night to ask him if it is true and to tell him that they hope he gets away with
it. Worried, Yossarian’s superior officers offer to assign him only
nondangerous missions if he agrees to fly; he refuses, because that would mean
that other men would have to fly his share of dangerous missions. One day,
Captain Black tells him that Nately’s whore and her kid sister have been
flushed out of their apartment by the military police (M.P.’s), and Yossarian
is suddenly worried about them.
Summary — Chapter 39: The
Eternal City
Yossarian travels to Rome with
Milo, who is disappointed in him for refusing to fly more combat missions. Rome
has been bombed and lies in ruins, and the apartment complex where the whores
lived is a deserted shambles. Yossarian finds the old woman who lived in the
complex sobbing. She tells Yossarian that the only right the soldiers had to
chase the girls away was the right of Catch-22, which says “they have a right
to do anything we can’t stop them from doing.” Yossarian asks if they had
Catch-22 written down and if they showed it to her, and she says that Catch-22
stipulates that they don’t have to show her Catch-22. Yossarian knows that
Catch-22 does not exist but that its nonexistence does not matter, because
everyone believes that it exists. Milo agrees to help Yossarian track down the
kid sister, but he becomes distracted when he learns about huge profits to be
made in trafficking illegal tobacco. He slinks away, and Yossarian is left to
wander the dark streets through a horrible night filled with grotesqueries and
loathsome sights: men beat dogs and children, a soldier convulses helplessly, a
woman is raped, and the sidewalk is strewn with broken human teeth. He returns
to his apartment late in the night to find that Aarfy has raped and killed a
maid. The M.P.’s burst in. They apologize to Aarfy for intruding and arrest
Yossarian for being in Rome without a pass.
Summary — Chapter 40: Catch-22
Back at Pianosa, Colonel
Cathcart and Colonel Korn want to send Yossarian home, but Catch-22 prevents
them. They offer Yossarian a deal: They will ground him and send him home if he
will agree to like them. He will be promoted to major and all he will have to
do is support the two colonels. Yossarian realizes that the deal is a frankly
atrocious betrayal of the men in his squadron, who will still have to fly the
eighty missions, but he persuades himself to take the deal anyway. The prospect
of going home fills him with joy. As Yossarian departs from Colonel Cathcart’s
office, Nately’s whore appears, disguised as a private, and stabs him until he
falls unconscious.
Summary — Chapter 41: Snowden
Man was matter, that was
Snowden’s secret. . . . Bury him and he’ll rot, like other kinds of garbage. .
. . Ripeness was all.
In the hospital, a group of
doctors argues over Yossarian while the fat, angry colonel who interrogated the
chaplain interrogates him. Finally, the doctors knock him out and operate on
him. When he wakes, he dimly perceives visits from Aarfy and the chaplain. He
tells the chaplain about his deal with Cathcart and Korn, and then assures him
that he isn’t going to do it. He vaguely remembers a malignant, almost
supernatural man jeering at him, “We’ve got your pal,” shortly after his
operation. He then tells the chaplain that his “pal” must have been one of his
friends who was killed in the war. He realizes that his only friend still
living is Hungry Joe, but then the chaplain tells him that Hungry Joe has
died—in his sleep, with Huple’s cat on his face.
Later, Yossarian wakes up to
find a mean-looking man in a hospital gown leering at him, saying, “We’ve got
your pal.” He asks who his pal is, and the man tells Yossarian he will find
out. Yossarian lunges for him, but the man glides away and vanishes. Yossarian
then has a flashback to Snowden’s death, which he relives in all its agony.
Smiling at him wanly, Snowden whimpers, “I’m cold.” Yossarian reassures him and
tries to mend the wound in Snowden’s leg, thinking that he will live. Finally,
Yossarian opens up Snowden’s flak suit, and Snowden’s insides spill out all
over him. Yossarian remembers the secret he read in those entrails: “The spirit
gone, man is garbage.” He thinks to himself that man is matter and that,
without the spirit, man will rot like garbage.
Summary — Chapter 42: Yossarian
In the hospital, Yossarian tries
to explain to Major Danby why he can no longer go through with Cathcart and
Korn’s deal: he won’t sell himself so short, and he won’t betray the memory of
his dead friends. Yossarian tells Danby that he plans to run away, but Danby
tells him that there is no hope, and Yossarian agrees. Suddenly, the chaplain
bursts in with the news that Orr has washed ashore in Sweden. Yossarian
realizes that Orr must have planned his escape all along and joyfully decides
that there is hope after all. He has the chaplain retrieve his clothes and
decides to desert the army and run to Sweden, where he can save himself from
the madness of the war. As he steps outside, Nately’s whore tries to stab him
again, and he runs into the distance.
Analysis — Chapters 38–42
This section plunges Yossarian
into the deepest, most surreal darkness in the novel—the night in Rome after
the disappearance of Nately’s whore and her sister is the most wrenching,
despairing scene in Catch-22—as Yossarian encounters example after
example of abuse, neglect, and oppression. This scene culminates in Aarfy’s
rape and murder of the maid, which finally explodes the question of moral
absolutes in war: Yossarian, outraged, repeats the most inviolable of those
absolutes—one cannot kill another person—and is then arrested for the
meaningless crime of being in Rome without a pass, while Aarfy receives an
apology from the police. Obviously, war carries a requirement to kill other
people, and, as the old woman who notes the dominance of Catch-22 is aware,
this fact undermines every other natural and moral law.
Snowden’s death has been hinted
at throughout the novel, but it is only in the second-to-last chapter that we
are finally allowed to see the scene from beginning to end. Because it is
placed near the end of the novel and is so clearly an important event,
Snowden’s death functions as the technical climax of Catch-22, even
though it took place before many of the novel’s other events. The progression
of the scene of Snowden’s death is similar to Yossarian’s progression
throughout the novel: at first, Yossarian thinks that he has control over death
and that he can stop Snowden’s leg wound from bleeding and save Snowden’s life;
later, he finds that death is a force utterly outside his control. The “secret”
revealed to him here is that man is made of inanimate matter and that no human
hands can restore life to a body once it has been destroyed by flak, disease,
or drowning.
Yossarian has taken Snowden’s
secret to heart, and he realizes that the impulse to live is the most important
human quality. But the impulse to live is not simply a desire to survive at any
cost: Yossarian cannot live as a hypocrite or as a slave; as a result, he
decides to incur enormous personal danger by attempting to escape from the military
rather than take the safe deal that would betray his friends. Yossarian chooses
simply to take his life back into his own hands, openly rejecting (rather than,
as the deal would have required, falsely embracing) the mentality of Catch-22
and making his run for freedom. He is inspired in this decision by the rather
absurd example of Orr, who has escaped to Sweden.
The appearance of Nately’s whore
in this section works as a bizarre kind of moral point of reference. Though
Yossarian is not responsible for Nately’s death, Nately’s whore still seems to
blame Yossarian, and, to an extent, Yossarian blames himself—at least enough to
feel responsible for the whore and her sister. But as long as he refuses to
comply with the military authorities, he manages to escape Nately’s whore’s
attempts to murder him. Only when he agrees to the deal with Cathcart and Korn
does she succeed in stabbing and seriously injuring him, suggesting that the
act of agreeing with these bureaucrats constitutes the metaphorical death of
Yossarian. At the end of the novel, when Yossarian makes his escape, the
whore’s presence is a surprisingly welcome one—and Yossarian succeeds in
getting away from her—proof that he is doing the right thing in refusing to
sell himself out to the bureaucracy.
