I’ve always said, and every right-thinking person should agree, that Catch-22 is the greatest American novel of the post-war period (that’s World War II if you’re counting), and the greatest of all post-modern novels. Recent decades have shown that a significant number of readers and critics agree with me, at least with assigning a classic status to Joseph Heller’s novel. Catch–22 was ranked as number 7 on the Modern Library’s list of the greatest English language novels of the twentieth century, and came in as number 33 on Penguin’s list of 100 must-read novels, as chosen by their readers. The Guardian included it in their list of the 100 Greatest Novels in English, and the Observer as one of the 100 Greatest Novels of All Time. Time magazine named it on its list of the 100 Best Novels in English Since 1923. The BBC-sponsored Big Read web poll looking for the best-loved book in the U.K. ranked Catch-22 as number 11, while the Radcliffe Publishing Course list of the 100 top novels of the twentieth century ranked Heller’s novels as number 15. Catch-22 holds down the number 45 (alphabetically) on my own list of the 100 Most Lovable Books in the English Language.
Catch-22 is a satirical, anti-war novel that follows the increasingly frantic attempts by the American bombardier Captain John Yossarian to stay alive. He has become convinced that everyone, not only the Germans but also his own incompetent and self-interested superior officers, is out to kill him, and so his only goal in life becomes the avoidance of death: He aims to “live forever or die trying.” He recognizes that he in danger not only from the enemy but also from the incompetence and selfish interests of his senior officers. His fellow officer Clevinger calls Yossarian crazy, and Yossarian replies “They’re trying to kill me.”
“No one’s trying to kill you,” Clevinger cried.
“Then why are they shooting at me?” Yossarian asked.
“They’re shooting at everyone,” Clevinger answered. “They’re trying to kill everyone.”
“And what difference does that make.”
Clevinger was already on his way, half out of his chair with emotion….There were many principles in which Clevinger believed passionately. He was crazy.
This conviction that the army itself is crazy and dedicated to the destruction of its personnel is embodied in the regulation that gives the novel its title, and has given the English language what is now a common phrase that everyone understands even if they haven’t read the book. Yossarian is incensed that the squadron’s commanding officer, Colonel Cathcart, keeps raising the number of combat missions that must be flown before a soldier can be rotated home. There is a regulation, though, that says a flier can be grounded if he is insane. All he has to do is to request not to fly any more missions:
There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind.
So if he’s crazy, he can ask to be grounded. But if he asks to be grounded, he must be sane, and so must continue to fly. It’s a damned if you do and damned if you don’t situation. Later in the book, another character says “Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can’t stop them from doing.” I was once stopped at a traffic light in Washington, D.C., at a corner with a large sign reading “No Right Turn.” When the light turned green, it was an arrow. Pointing right. That’s what Catch-22 means.
One of the aspects of the novel that makes it particularly “post-modern” is its non-linear plot structure. The novel begins in the middle of the story (in medias res, like a classical epic) and circles back again and again to earlier events. The “present” of the novel is on the Mediterranean island of Pianosa near the Italian mainland. Most of the events take place there, or in Rome when Yossarian and his fellows are on leave. But some events occur earlier, during basic training in Colorado and later Air Corps training in California. The looping structure of the novel has the narrative circling the central event of the plot, which is not revealed to us until close to the end of the novel: This is the raid on Avignon, in which the panicked incompetence of Yossarian’s pilot and copilot result in the death of the plane’s radio-gunner Snowden, who dies horribly in Yossarian’s arms, his insides spewing all over Yossarian’s clothing. That is the point at which Yossarian, suffering a kind of PTST, stares death in the face and decides he wants no part of it.
In the intricate winding of the plot, Heller weaves many strands, all underscoring the absurdity of existence. Yossarian spends a good deal of time in Rome, where his best friend Nately has fallen in love with a sex worker who seems completely indifferent to him, and whom everybody refers to as “Nately’s Whore.” When Nately is killed (as are the majority of Yossarian’s friends), he takes it on himself to give her the bad news, and her reaction is to blame Yossarian, so that he spends the rest of the novel trying to evade her attempts to kill him. Late in the novel, after learning that the army has shut down the brothel, Yossarian goes to Rome without getting a pass, but finds no trace of Nately’s whore or her kid sister. His search takes him to the American officers’ apartment in Rome, where he is appalled to find that one of his pilots, Aarfy, has raped and killed a maid. When the military police arrive, they ignore Aarfy and arrest Yossarian for being absent without official leave.
The army’s symbiotic relationship with capitalism is satirized in the novel in the person of Milo Minderbinder, who runs a hugely profitable black market syndicate called M&M Enterprises, the slogan of which is “What’s good for M&M Enterprises is good for the country,” thus equating profit with patriotism. Meanwhile, Milo makes a deal with the Germans to strafe his own airstrip, because, of course, it makes him a profit.
Aside from the lambasting of the military-industrial complex, much of the bureaucratic idiocy in the military seems to come directly from superior officers, of whom Colonel Cathcart is the prime example. He keeps raising the number of missions his men must fly before being rotated home, from fifty to sixty to seventy to eighty, for no good reason except to gain the reputation of a tough officer wiling to risk everything to defeat the enemy, though he has only flown one mission in his life and is gaining his reputation by getting the officers under him killed. Cathcart’s summoning the Chaplain Tappman to meet with him leads the chaplain to think he may be asked to contribute something to the men’s spiritual lives, but Cathcart has summoned him to ask him to pray for a “tighter bomb pattern”—he wants his planes to drop their bombs in a neat and photogenic pattern so that they will make a good picture and get him into the Saturday Evening Post, and thus add to his reputation. But he finds the chaplain’s suggested prayers unsatisfying, and asks “Haven’t you got anything humorous that stays away from waters and valleys and God? I’d like to keep away from religion altogether if we can.”
Belief in God, in fact, is presented throughout the novel as unhelpful at best, and harmful at worst, in Yossarian’s view of the world as meaningless. Given the extent of evil, tragedy, and loss in the world, he engages in a long rant against the idea that God is in control despite these things:
“And don’t tell me God works in mysterious ways,” Yossarian continued, hurtling over her objections. “There’s nothing so mysterious about it. He’s not working at all. He’s playing or else He’s forgotten all about us. That’s the kind of God you people talk about—a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. …What a colossal, immortal blunderer! When you consider the opportunity and power He had to really do a job, and then look at the stupid, ugly little mess He made of it instead, His sheer incompetence is almost staggering. …”
In short, Catch-22 is in the category known in the sixties as the “Black Humor” novel, along with works by Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut. Sometimes these might be called “absurd literature”—the prose fiction equivalent of Beckett and Ionesco’s “Theater of the Absurd.” Essentially the three premises on which absurdity exists are these: 1) The universe is meaningless. 2) If anything in the universe has meaning, human beings cannot rationally know it. 3) If anything in the universe has meaning and can be rationally known, lit cannot be expressed in language. Stripped to its basics, this is essentially the world Yossarian lives in.
All this sounds quite gloomy, and you might be asking, “Then why is Catch-22 so hilarious?” Part of it, of course, is the human spirit laughing in the face of devastation. Despite all, humanity endures. But on the specific level, on the level of Yossarian as protagonist, Snowden’s death brought home to him the grim truth that death is annihilation. But his response is not to give up but rather to cling to life and all its experiences because that’s all there is. “Anything worth living for is worth dying for,” Nately says, trying to justify his patriotism to an old man in his girlfriend’s brothel. “And anything worth dying for is certainly worth living for,” is the old man’s answer. It might easily be Yossarian’s.
If you’re interested in a film version of the novel, Mike Nichols (The Graduate) directed the star-studded 1970 movie, adapted for the screen by Nichols and Buck Henry (who also appears in the film). Heller himself approved of the film, and critics generally were positive, though some did not think it did the novel justice. For my part, I think Alan Arkin is absolutely perfect as Yossarian, frenetic and deadpan by turns with perfect comic timing and perfect existential angst.
A more recent limited series, the six-part 2019 version shown on Hulu, is essentially awful. No one, including the audience, seems to be aware that this is supposed to be a comedy. I wrote a whole scathing review of this miniseries when it came out, and if you’re interested, you can read it here http://jayruud.com/catch-22/
Suffice it to say that essentially this series takes all the satiric power away from the story—Milo Minderbinder is just a smart businessman (not a rapacious monster who sells his officers’ parachutes for a profit). Chaplain Tappman is fine with Colonel Cathcart’s unconscionable abuse of his men in the perpetual raising of missions. And Yossarian ends up back flying missions at the end. Who thought this was a better ending than the original (which I haven’t disclosed here so as to avoid spoilers)? It’s as if they tried to make a Catch-22 that did not offend anyone. And oh yeah, one that was dull rather than funny. So read the book, and definitely skip this yawner of an adaptation.