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Catch-22 is way more insane than I thought it was going to be. It’s one of those books that I’ve always had some vague conception of; I knew that it was about World War II, and obviously I understood the term “Catch-22” as a colloquialism that people use in day-to-day speech, but the book is simultaneously way funnier, way more absurd, way stranger, and way darker than I ever would have expected. I don’t know how to approach talking about this book, so I think I’m just gonna jump around and talk about random points of interest as they come to mind. This method seems appropriate as Catch-22 operates in much the same way; having a very loose sense of chronology, abruptly shifting from scene to scene without warning and without a sense of which temporal direction you are heading.
I guess I should start by talking about Catch-22, as a concept. I think the phrase has lost a little bit of its original intended meaning, which is a normal product of the evolution of language, but it definitely has a more specific definition in this book than it does when you hear it out in the wild. I always thought a “Catch-22” was just any lose-lose situation. If your two options are both bad things then bam, you’ve got yourself a Catch-22. In the book, Catch-22 (aside from being some vaguely defined military ordinance) is a problem whose only solution is impossible due to some inherent contradiction within the problem itself. The primary example of this, and a motif that the book returns to very often, is more or less the crux of the entire novel. The protagonist, Yossarian, is a bombardier who feels he has already flown enough dangerous missions and is ready to be grounded and sent home. The Colonel, however, keeps raising the required number of missions faster than Yossarian can complete them. Unfortunately, the only way to get sent home before you finish your allotted missions is to be deemed crazy. But understanding the danger of flying combat missions and wanting to get sent home is an inherently sane and rational point of view, so you won’t be deemed crazy, and you have to fly the missions. The very act of wanting to get sent home, disqualifies you from getting sent home, in other words.
Like I mentioned, that’s sort of the primary example, but there are a lot of Catch-22s within Catch-22. For instance, there is a character named Major Major Major Major who makes a rule that he will only see people in his office when he’s not there. If someone comes to see him, they have to wait for him to leave before they can go into his office. Another character named Doc Daneeka is falsely reported dead in a plane crash because he was listed on the flight logs, but he can’t convince people the flight logs are incorrect because everyone thinks he’s dead. Perhaps the most concise example is near the end of the book when an old Italian woman reports that she was told by US soldiers, after destroying her entire apartment complex, that “we can do anything you can’t stop us from doing”.
I think this idea serves a couple of purposes throughout this book. For one, Joseph Heller was actually a real life bombardier in World War II, and he is very blatantly critiquing the bureaucracy of the military. It is filled with contradictions and absurdities, inane rules and regulations that serve no other purpose than to perpetuate their own existence and to maintain control over the lives of the people living in this system. Obviously in the book Heller ramps this up to cartoonish extremes, but there is truth to the core idea that war is irrational and unjust and is used as a tool to maintain and consolidate power rather than do anything virtuous or good.
The other primary purpose of Catch-22 as a concept is that it’s fucking funny! This book is genuinely laugh-out-loud hilarious which is no easy task for a novel, in my opinion. So much of humor relies on pacing and delivery, so to be this funny through nothing but words on a page is pretty remarkable. It’s a really stupid kind of humor, but it’s also incredibly clever. Whatever it is, it’s the exact sort of thing that makes me laugh, apparently. Every single scene with Orr and the whole crabapples / horse chestnuts bit had me struggling to continue reading because of how much it was making me laugh. Same with Major Major Major Major’s backstory, the bit about the man who saw everything twice, Milo’s whole convoluted business venture, Colonel Cathcart’s pathetic groveling for favor, no other book has made me laugh this frequently, and it’s really not even close.
What really makes this book special, however, is how quickly it can veer into some incredibly dark and harrowing territory. This is a book about war, after all, and war is horrible. Joseph Heller, through direct experience, portrays flying a fighter plane as an act that is immensely terrifying and dreadful. He paints such vivid scenes of these planes barreling through flak and explosions, the passengers disoriented, screaming, afraid. One of the recurring motifs in this book is a specific scene in which Yossarian helplessly watches in terror as Snowden, the young gunner on one of his flights, dies an excruciating death. It’s not really a ‘flashback’ as this book doesn’t occur in chronological order in the first place, but the scene is returned to many times throughout the book, a little bit more fleshed out with each appearance (no pun intended). It was a deeply traumatic event for Yossarian, a profoundly sad scene, and yet something which is intrinsically tied to all of his detached sense of humor throughout the story. Some of the best prose in the book too. “Man is matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out of a window, and he'll fall. Set fire to him, and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man was garbage.”
I don’t know what else to say, this book is just kind of brilliant. Every character is so unique and bizarre and hilarious, every scene is so cleverly constructed and purposeful. And all without any discernible plot or chronology! There’s not really a dull moment - besides maybe some of the unnecessarily long brothel scenes - but I think the central thesis of this book is incredibly salient, which is that war is insane. It is an inherently insane thing to do, it makes its participants insane, and it is insane on all ends of the emotional spectrum. It’s dark, funny, terrifying, strange, sad, and most importantly, it’s absurd. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book quite like this, and I’m not sure that there is another a book quite like this.
I guess I should start by talking about Catch-22, as a concept. I think the phrase has lost a little bit of its original intended meaning, which is a normal product of the evolution of language, but it definitely has a more specific definition in this book than it does when you hear it out in the wild. I always thought a “Catch-22” was just any lose-lose situation. If your two options are both bad things then bam, you’ve got yourself a Catch-22. In the book, Catch-22 (aside from being some vaguely defined military ordinance) is a problem whose only solution is impossible due to some inherent contradiction within the problem itself. The primary example of this, and a motif that the book returns to very often, is more or less the crux of the entire novel. The protagonist, Yossarian, is a bombardier who feels he has already flown enough dangerous missions and is ready to be grounded and sent home. The Colonel, however, keeps raising the required number of missions faster than Yossarian can complete them. Unfortunately, the only way to get sent home before you finish your allotted missions is to be deemed crazy. But understanding the danger of flying combat missions and wanting to get sent home is an inherently sane and rational point of view, so you won’t be deemed crazy, and you have to fly the missions. The very act of wanting to get sent home, disqualifies you from getting sent home, in other words.
Like I mentioned, that’s sort of the primary example, but there are a lot of Catch-22s within Catch-22. For instance, there is a character named Major Major Major Major who makes a rule that he will only see people in his office when he’s not there. If someone comes to see him, they have to wait for him to leave before they can go into his office. Another character named Doc Daneeka is falsely reported dead in a plane crash because he was listed on the flight logs, but he can’t convince people the flight logs are incorrect because everyone thinks he’s dead. Perhaps the most concise example is near the end of the book when an old Italian woman reports that she was told by US soldiers, after destroying her entire apartment complex, that “we can do anything you can’t stop us from doing”.
I think this idea serves a couple of purposes throughout this book. For one, Joseph Heller was actually a real life bombardier in World War II, and he is very blatantly critiquing the bureaucracy of the military. It is filled with contradictions and absurdities, inane rules and regulations that serve no other purpose than to perpetuate their own existence and to maintain control over the lives of the people living in this system. Obviously in the book Heller ramps this up to cartoonish extremes, but there is truth to the core idea that war is irrational and unjust and is used as a tool to maintain and consolidate power rather than do anything virtuous or good.
The other primary purpose of Catch-22 as a concept is that it’s fucking funny! This book is genuinely laugh-out-loud hilarious which is no easy task for a novel, in my opinion. So much of humor relies on pacing and delivery, so to be this funny through nothing but words on a page is pretty remarkable. It’s a really stupid kind of humor, but it’s also incredibly clever. Whatever it is, it’s the exact sort of thing that makes me laugh, apparently. Every single scene with Orr and the whole crabapples / horse chestnuts bit had me struggling to continue reading because of how much it was making me laugh. Same with Major Major Major Major’s backstory, the bit about the man who saw everything twice, Milo’s whole convoluted business venture, Colonel Cathcart’s pathetic groveling for favor, no other book has made me laugh this frequently, and it’s really not even close.
What really makes this book special, however, is how quickly it can veer into some incredibly dark and harrowing territory. This is a book about war, after all, and war is horrible. Joseph Heller, through direct experience, portrays flying a fighter plane as an act that is immensely terrifying and dreadful. He paints such vivid scenes of these planes barreling through flak and explosions, the passengers disoriented, screaming, afraid. One of the recurring motifs in this book is a specific scene in which Yossarian helplessly watches in terror as Snowden, the young gunner on one of his flights, dies an excruciating death. It’s not really a ‘flashback’ as this book doesn’t occur in chronological order in the first place, but the scene is returned to many times throughout the book, a little bit more fleshed out with each appearance (no pun intended). It was a deeply traumatic event for Yossarian, a profoundly sad scene, and yet something which is intrinsically tied to all of his detached sense of humor throughout the story. Some of the best prose in the book too. “Man is matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out of a window, and he'll fall. Set fire to him, and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man was garbage.”
I don’t know what else to say, this book is just kind of brilliant. Every character is so unique and bizarre and hilarious, every scene is so cleverly constructed and purposeful. And all without any discernible plot or chronology! There’s not really a dull moment - besides maybe some of the unnecessarily long brothel scenes - but I think the central thesis of this book is incredibly salient, which is that war is insane. It is an inherently insane thing to do, it makes its participants insane, and it is insane on all ends of the emotional spectrum. It’s dark, funny, terrifying, strange, sad, and most importantly, it’s absurd. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book quite like this, and I’m not sure that there is another a book quite like this.