#Catch22 #warnovel, #protestnovel #surrealnovel
#JosephHeller is an American writer known for his novels, short stories, plays, and screenplays. As such his best-known work
is the 1961 novel #Catch22, a satire on war and bureaucracy, whose title has
become a synonym for an absurd or contradictory choice. Well as such Catch-22 is
considered to be one of the most significant American novels of the 1900s.
The novel is a revolutionary work and one of
its kind. In this novel, Heller uses a non-chronological third-person omniscient
narration to bind the threads together. Ideas flow into each other through
random connections within the story. Events have been repeated from a different points of view. The story is situated in the time of World War 2.
This story is about the life of Captain John Yossarian, a U.S. Army Air Forces bombardier
in the 256th squadron who has been assigned to bomb enemy posts in eastern
France and Italy.
No doubt the novel is one of the most
significant works of protest literature written in the 20th century and it has
given an expression to the world cutting across all climates and cultures. Catch
22 has been described variously as a war novel, a protest novel, and most importantly, a surreal novel. While several attempts have been
made to analyze the novel in Marxist terms and from the psychological point of
view, up until today the surreal elements in the novel have not been explicated.
Surrealism has been described variously as
a movement. Surrealism is noted for its unpredictability, inconsistency, its
disregard for causality, and vividness of its images. Surrealism also includes
an element of surprise. Well as such, Catch 22 does not follow the
traditional style of narrating events where the storytime corresponds to text
time. The fragmentary nature of the discourse is caused by disruption of order, duration,
and frequency. While at one level the novel deals with a realistic event, which
is war, simultaneously Heller, through his narrative, brings in a surreal
element to draw attention to the devastation that the war inflicts on humankind.
By refusing to engage in war, Yossarian gets metamorphosed into a true hero. It
is in moments of cowardice, that Yossarian proves that he is the bravest of
them all.
The novel is set during World War II, from
1942 to 1944. It chiefly follows the life of Captain John Yossarian, a U.S.
Army Air Forces B-25 bombardier. Most of the events in the book occur while the
fictional 256th Squadron is based on the island of Pianosa, in the
Mediterranean Sea, west of Italy. The novel looks into the experiences of
Yossarian and the other airmen in the camp, who attempt to maintain their
sanity while fulfilling their service requirements so that they may return
home.
The novel generated a great deal of controversy upon its initial publication in 1961. Critics tended either to adore it or despise it, and those who hated it did so for the same reasons as the critics who loved it. As such overtime, Catch-22 has become one of the defining novels of the twentieth century. It presents an utterly unsentimental vision of war, stripping all romantic pretenses away from combat, replacing visions of glory and honor with a kind of terrifying comedy of violence, bureaucracy, and paradoxical madness. This kind of irony has come to be expected of war novels since the Vietnam War, but in the wake of World War II, which most Americans believed was a just and heroic war, Catch-22 was shocking. It proved almost prophetic about both the Vietnam War, a conflict that began a few years after the novel was originally published, and the sense of disillusionment about the military that many Americans experienced during this conflict.
Catch-22 also distinguishes itself from other
antiromantic war novels through its core values: the story of Yossarian, the
protagonist, is ultimately not one of despair but one of hope. He believes that
the positive urge to live and to be free can redeem the individual from the
dehumanizing machinery of war. The novel is told as a series of loosely
related, indirect stories in no particular chronological order. The narrative
that emerges from this structural jumble upholds the value of the individual in
the face of the impersonal, collective military mass; at every stage, it mocks
insincerity and hypocrisy, even when such values appear triumphant.
Winning a war is only beneficial to those
who live past the war’s end. The book’s protagonist, Capt. John Yossarian was
not willing to die for the war—and this is precisely what makes Catch-22 one
of the most enduring and important war novels to date. It is a vicious satire
of the war industry and a piercing reflection on humanity’s deepest secrets,
but it stands out most for featuring a wartime protagonist unwilling to
sacrifice himself.
Well quitting is not easy for Yossarian,
either. In another war novel, wanting to quit the war would have made him a
pitiful character at best, a cowardly one at worst. In Catch-22, it
made him a hero. Heller painstakingly shares Yossarian’s internal and external
struggles as he fights to quit in a system that only wants his sacrifice, so we
can see just how heroic quitting is: “He stepped into the briefing room with
mixed emotions, uncertain how he was supposed to feel about Kraft and the
others, for they had all died in the distance of a mute and secluded agony at a
moment when he was up to his own ass in the same vile, excruciating dilemma of
duty and damnation.”
Such a comedic, distressing, deserter-as-hero narrative was virtually unheard of at the time Catch-22 was published. With Catch-22 Hellen breaks from the trend. In creating a protagonist whose nobility sparks from his desire to live, Heller made one of the most compelling statements of any anti-war movement to date: that an individual life is more important than the ideals of country, honor, or sacrifice.
Despite its World War II setting, Catch-22 is
often thought of as a signature novel of the 1960s and 1970s. It was during
those decades that American youth truly began to question authority. Hippies,
university protests, and the civil rights movement all marked the 1960s as a
decade of revolution, and Heller’s novel fits in perfectly with the spirit of
the times. In fact, Heller once said, “I wasn’t interested in the war in Catch-22. I
was interested in the personal relationships in bureaucratic authority.”
Whether Heller was using the war to comment on authority or using bureaucracy
as a statement about the war, it is clear that Catch-22 is
more than just a war novel. It is also a novel about the moral choices that
every person must make when faced with a system of authority whose rules are
both immoral and illogical.
As such at the end of the novel, Yossarian
lives. That’s the most important facet of the book: that he finds his
way out of an impossible-seeming situation and saves himself in the end. Not
only does he live, but he does so with virtue and grace. He even refuses a
soft, safe, unethical deal offered by his superiors, which would get him out of
the war in exchange for his silence on atrocities. Instead, he quits in his own
way, against all rules and advice.Catch-22 reminds us that opting
out of this life-threatening situation is noble. Self-preservation deserves
praise. We should criticize the systems that ask people to put their lives on
the line, not the people who choose to opt out.
Today Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961)
is considered one of the most important American novels of the twentieth
century. It was a massive bestseller that sold over 10 million copies, and it
introduced a new phrase into the English language for an unsolvable conundrum
or paradox. Catch-22 was ground-breaking because it was the
first broadly successful American novel that offered a post-modern, satirical
take on the Second World War.
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