Catch-22

About Catch-22

Joseph Heller published Catch-22 in 1961, and it was one of the most divisive literary debuts of the twentieth century. Some reviewers found it a masterpiece; others found it shapeless, repetitive, and self-indulgent. Both groups were correct, and the novel’s greatness is inseparable from those apparent flaws. It is shapeless because the war it describes is shapeless. It is repetitive because bureaucratic absurdity is repetitive. It is self-indulgent because the rage it expresses at military institutions has nowhere to go, and Heller found that the most honest formal response to that rage was to keep amplifying it rather than resolving it.

The novel is set on the fictional island of Pianosa, off the coast of Italy, during the final campaigns of World War Two. Its protagonist, Captain John Yossarian, is a bombardier who has decided that the war is specifically trying to kill him personally and that the only sane response to this is to try not to get killed. This is treated as a mental disorder by everyone around him. The catch that gives the novel its title is the one that blocks his every attempt to escape: to be grounded for insanity, you must request to be grounded; but the act of requesting demonstrates your sanity, because only a sane person would want to be removed from combat. You can never get out.

Heller drew on his own experience as a B-25 bombardier flying sixty combat missions. But the novel is not exactly a war novel; it is a bureaucracy novel that happens to be set in a war. The enemy that Yossarian faces is not the Germans but the American military system: the colonels who keep raising the required number of missions, the officers who use the war as a career opportunity, and the logic of an institution that has stopped caring whether the people inside it live or die.

Plot Summary

The novel is famously non-linear: it circles its events rather than narrating them in sequence, returning again and again to certain incidents (the death of Snowden, the Great Big Siege of Bologna) before finally revealing what happened. This is deliberate. The trauma at the center of the novel cannot be approached directly, and Heller structures the book to enact the way a mind deals with something it cannot face.

Yossarian is a bombardier trying to survive. Colonel Cathcart keeps raising the number of missions required before a man can be sent home: it starts at forty and climbs continuously, so that every time anyone gets close to the number, the number goes up. The men around Yossarian have various strategies for coping: Milo Minderbinder has built a sprawling black-market syndicate that sells anything to anyone including, eventually, the Germans; Major Major Major Major hides in his office and escapes through the window when anyone tries to visit him; the Chaplain watches all of this with increasing spiritual distress.

The darker currents of the novel run underneath the comedy. Snowden dies on a mission, bleeding quietly in the back of the plane, and Yossarian holds him as he dies, not yet understanding what he sees. Clevinger disappears into a cloud and never comes out. Dunbar is “disappeared” after asserting his right to exist too loudly. Each death is handled with a brevity that makes it worse. The comedy and the horror exist in the same register, which is the novel’s central formal achievement: it refuses to separate them because the people who ran the war refused to separate them.

At the novel’s end, Yossarian learns that his Swedish friend Orr has survived by rowing a life raft to Sweden, having spent the whole war rehearsing his escape. Yossarian, in what is either a heroic or completely delusional act, decides to do the same.

Key Themes

The Logic of Institutions vs. The Logic of Survival

The catch-22 is the novel’s governing symbol, and it captures something precise about institutional logic: the institution cannot be wrong by definition, because the definition is made by the institution. Every rule Yossarian encounters functions the same way. The rules are circular. They protect the institution from external challenge by incorporating any challenge as evidence for the rule. Yossarian cannot be sane because sanity is defined by willingness to keep flying missions, and he is unwilling. His survival instinct is classified as a symptom.

Capitalism and War

Milo Minderbinder runs M&M Enterprises with a cheerful rapacity that eventually encompasses both sides of the war. When he bombs his own squadron on a German contract, he sees no contradiction: the syndicate owns shares in everything, so everyone has a share in the bombing. Heller uses Milo to argue that capitalism and warfare are not in tension but are the same system: both require the abstraction of human lives into units that can be exchanged, and both reward the person who performs that abstraction most efficiently and without guilt.

Sanity and Its Costs

Yossarian is the novel’s sane man, which is why everyone treats him as a lunatic. His sanity consists of the belief that death is bad and should be avoided, which within the military system is a radical position. The truly disturbing characters in the novel are the ones who are completely adjusted to it: Cathcart, who wants to be photographed for The Saturday Evening Post; Milo, who has rationalized himself into genuinely believing the market is always right; General Dreedle, who wants his girlfriend present at everything, including death. Their comfort with the situation is more frightening than any aberration.

The Absurdity of Bureaucratic Language

Heller was working in the tradition of Kafka, and it shows. The novel is full of conversations in which language has been severed from meaning: military reports are written to satisfy forms, not to describe reality; orders are issued whose purpose no one can explain; men are punished for things that aren’t violations of rules that don’t exist. The catch-22 is the purest example: a rule that cannot be questioned because questioning it would mean you understand it, which demonstrates that you are subject to it. Bureaucratic language, in this novel, is not a failure of communication. It is its purpose.

Meet the Characters

Yossarian is the man trying to stay alive in a world that has decided his life is an acceptable cost of doing business. He is also funny, vain, horny, and occasionally unkind, which is important: Heller does not make him a saint. His desire to live is entirely selfish and entirely right. Talking to Yossarian on Novelium means engaging with a man who has looked at his situation clearly and found it unacceptable, and who is trying to figure out what unacceptable means in practice.

Milo Minderbinder is the most cheerful character in the novel and possibly its most frightening. He has no malice. He has no awareness that what he is doing could be harmful, because the market, as he understands it, is a force of nature rather than a human choice. Users can talk to him on Novelium and encounter a perfectly operational conscience that has been removed and replaced with an accounting ledger.

Colonel Cathcart wants to be a general and will sacrifice any number of lives to get there. He is not a strategic thinker; he is a political one. His primary skill is an acute sensitivity to what his superiors want to see, combined with a total indifference to what his subordinates need to survive. On Novelium, talking to Cathcart is an exercise in recognizing a very contemporary kind of institutional ambition.

Major Major Major Major was named by a father with a cruel sense of humor and promoted by a computer to the rank of Major, making his full title and rank identical. He is profoundly uncomfortable with authority and has developed a system for avoiding human contact that would be impressive if it weren’t so sad. Users can talk to him on Novelium and find a man hiding from his own position in the world, which turns out to be a more relatable condition than it sounds.

Chaplain Tappman is the novel’s moral register: the character most disturbed by the gap between what religion says and what the war does. He keeps encountering things he cannot explain and a sense of déjà vu that Heller uses to suggest the repetitive, circular nature of institutional evil. On Novelium, talking to the Chaplain means talking to someone who hasn’t given up on meaning but is running out of reasons not to.

Why Talk to Characters from Catch-22?

Catch-22 is structured to prevent resolution. Its circular time, its circular logic, its characters who keep appearing in new contexts doing increasingly terrible things: all of this is designed to produce the sensation of entrapment that Yossarian experiences. You cannot read your way out of it any more than he can fly his way out of it.

When you talk to book characters from Catch-22 on Novelium, you step outside that circular structure and get to ask direct questions. Does Milo understand what he has become? What does Cathcart actually believe in, if anything? Does the Chaplain still have faith? Voice conversations on Novelium let you have the conversation that the novel’s form refuses to allow, which is, perhaps, the most interesting thing you can do with a book about a trap.

About the Author

Joseph Heller was born in 1923 in Brooklyn, the son of Jewish immigrants, and flew sixty combat missions as a B-25 bombardier during World War Two. He spent the next twelve years writing Catch-22, completing it while working in advertising, and it was rejected by several publishers before Simon and Schuster took it in 1961.

The novel was not immediately recognized as a masterpiece: early sales were modest and critical reception divided. It found its audience among the generation that came of age during Vietnam, for whom its portrait of an institution that destroys the people inside it in the service of goals no one can explain was immediately recognizable. It became one of the defining texts of American counterculture and added a phrase to the language. Heller never matched it commercially, though Something Happened (1974) is, by some measures, the darker and more technically accomplished book. He died in 1999, and the world he described in Catch-22 has not, despite considerable effort, caught him up.