by Maureen Cutajar

Created on: December 19, 2009

The world of Catch-22 which initially starts out as a bureaucratic absurdity, ends as a metaphysical representation of the human condition. The novel is concerned with physical survival against exterior forces or institutions that want to destroy life or the moral and spiritual self. The plot that starts out in festive disorder and misrule, in the realm of the carnivalesque, gradually makes its way towards an individual’s quest of meaning and order.

 The form of the novel is slightly confusing. It is episodic and seems to adopt and apparently random method of rendering events, moving back and forth in time from scene to scene, from character to character, and situation to situation, and returning again and again to the same scenes put into a new light. Events and characters are treated in brief burst showing as the novel progresses that these apparently unintelligible events do have a meaning and they do come together. The book begins to acquire the character of an argument and order, taking Yossarian himself from a monomaniac concern with his own situation to a process of discovery, a degree of understanding, even a means of relief.

 The novel never gives a definition but gives various examples of what is Catch-22: The only way to get out of combat duty is to be certified insane. But since anyone who wants to escape combat duty cannot possibly be crazy, since ‘a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind’, there is no way to get out of combat duty. ‘That’s some catch, that Catch-22’. This sort of logic is made by the system and is an ‘elliptical precision’ by which the system will always contrive to entrap the individual. The novel allegorises a system in which the individual is devoid of choice. On the surface the novel is an allegorical satire of American’s involvement in Vietnam delineated in the context of the Second World War, but it goes beyond that – It is the arbitrariness that governs any bureaucratic or military system, the elegant randomness of life.

 Heller takes a tragic situation that is not ‘funny at all’ and dresses it up with humour. There are many instances of humour but also several tragic moments the more evident as the novel unfolds: People die violent deaths, Snowden dies spilling his entrails, and eventually Yossarian loses a number of his friends. Death pervades the world

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