#Catch 22, Justify the title

#Catch 22,  Justify the title 

 Fifty years after its original publication, #Catch-22 remains a keystone of American literature and one of the funniest—and most celebrated—books of all time. In recent years it has been named on “best novels” lists by Time, Newsweek, the Modern Library, and the London Observer.

The term Catch-22 has become a part of our cultural lexicon, but what many do not know is that it is a term that author #JosephHeller made up out of nowhere as a title for his classic novel about soldiers trying to survive the bureaucracy of war.Catch-22 was originally entitled Catch-18, but the title was altered just before publication; another novel, Mila 18 by Leon Uris, had been recently released, and the publisher feared readers would be confused.

The Collins English Dictionary defines a Catch-22 as follows: “If you describe a situation as a catch-22, you mean it is an impossible situation because you cannot do one thing until you do another thing, but you cannot do the second thing until you do the first thing.”

It is a dilemma or difficult circumstance from which there is no escape due to mutually conflicting or dependent conditions. It’s also come to stand for frustrating bureaucratic logic or rules.

Heller coined the term in his book, which describes absurd bureaucratic constraints on soldiers in World War II. The book is set on an American airbase in Italy and tells the story of Captain Yossarian, a bombardier in the Army Air Corps who wants to be discharged.

The only way he can be discharged is by claiming that the war has made him insane. However, the camp’s doctor points out that Yossarian’s desire to be discharged proves his sanity. Yossarian is caught in a paradoxical situation.

The term is first introduced by the character Doc Daneeka, an army psychiatrist who invokes “Catch-22” to explain why any pilot requesting mental evaluation for insanity demonstrates his own sanity in creating the request and thus cannot be declared insane.

How does it first appear in the novel?

Yossarian: “You mean there’s a catch?”

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

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

“That’s some catch, that Catch-22,” he observed.

“It’s the best there is,” Doc Daneeka agreed.”

 Different formulations of Catch-22 appear throughout the novel, to highlight the absurdity of war itself. The term is applied to various loopholes and quirks of the military system, always with the implication that rules are created and used against those lower in the hierarchy, who find themselves in paradoxical situations.

In chapter six, Yossarian is told that Catch-22 requires him to do anything his commanding officer tells him to do, regardless of whether these orders contradict orders from the officer’s superiors. Later on in the story, Catch-22 is described to Yossarian by an old woman recounting an act of violence by soldiers;

“Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can’t stop them from doing.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Yossarian shouted at her in bewildered, furious protest. “How did you know it was Catch-22? Who the hell told you it was Catch-22?”

 Other forms of Catch-22 are invoked throughout the novel to justify various bureaucratic actions. Yossarian comes to realize that Catch-22 does not actually exist, but because the powers that claim it does, and the world believes it does, it nevertheless has potent effects. Indeed, because it does not exist, there is no way it can be repealed, undone, overthrown, or denounced. The combination of force with specious and spurious legalistic justification is one of the book's primary motifs.

 As such for most of the novel, Catch-22 defines the maddening, paradoxical thought processes by which the military runs its soldiers’ lives; any time Yossarian spies a potential way out of the war, there is a catch, and it is always called Catch-22. Doc Daneeka offers the first explanation: requests to go home are only honored for the insane, but anyone who would ask to be taken off combat duty must necessarily be sane. Another example is Captain Black’s Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade: men are required to sign loyalty oaths before they can eat, but they are not forced to sign loyalty oaths because they are always free to not eat. The officials reason that Major Major must be a communist because he has not signed a loyalty oath, but he is not allowed to sign a loyalty oath because Captain Black won’t let him.

This kind of thinking enables the war, and it permeates the novel, even in settings outside the official grasp of Catch-22. Luciana, for instance, will not marry Yossarian because he is crazy, and she knows he is crazy because he wants to marry her. If he did not want to marry her, he would not be crazy, and then she could marry him. The most penetrating explanation of Catch-22 is also the last that the novel offers—when the old woman outside the whorehouse in Rome says that Catch-22 indicates that “they have a right to do anything we can’t stop them from doing.” She says that Catch-22 is fundamentally inscrutable: the law says that those in power do not have to show Catch-22 to anyone, and the law that says so is Catch-22. This statement confirms what Yossarian has always known: Catch-22 does not really exist; it is merely a justification for the strong to use against the weak. It is the abstract mechanism at the heart of Catch-22, the mechanism by which the military can force human beings with the desire to live into endlessly dehumanizing situations in which they are likely to be killed. The unanswerable paradox of unearned power means that those in power can do anything that the subjects of that power cannot stop them from doing.

Thus the novel's title refers to a plot device that is repeatedly invoked in the story. Catch-22 starts as a set of paradoxical requirements whereby airmen mentally unfit to fly did not have to, but could not actually be excused. By the end of the novel, the phrase is invoked as the explanation for many unreasonable restrictions. Catch-22 has since entered the English language and can be understood as an unsolvable logic puzzle, a difficult situation from which there is no escape.

The novel draws to a close as Yossarian, troubled by Nately’s death, refuses to fly any more missions. He wanders the streets of Rome. Encountering every kind of human horror-rape, disease, murder, he is eventually arrested for being in Rome without a pass, and his superior officers, Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Korn offer him a choice. He can either face a court-martial or be released and sent home with an honorable discharge. There is only one condition in order to be released, he must approve of Cathcart and Korn and state his support for their policy, which requires all the men in the squadron to fly eight missions. Although he is tempted by the offer, Yossarian realizes that to comply would be to endanger the lives of their innocent men. He chooses another way out, deciding to desert the army and flee to neutral Sweden. In doing so, he turns his back on the dehumanizing machinery of the military, rejects the rule of Catch-22, and strives to gain control of his own life.