In forty-two dizzying
chapters,
Catch-22 tells the story of Yossarian’s increasingly desperate attempts to avoid flying any more bombing
missions during World
War II. His superior officer, Colonel Cathcart, progressively increases the number of
required missions, starting at thirty-five and going up to eighty, when Yossarian finally takes an effective stand. During that time, readers are witness to an absurd series of mishaps developing from (or in spite of) an incompetent U.S. military, which is somehow winning the war against Germany.
The chronology of events signaled by the number of missions that Yossarian has flown at any particular point, is deliberately obscured. Among chapters, and even in individual chapters, scenes occur out of order. Colonel Cathcart raises the required missions to fifty near the beginning of the book, but later readers learn about earlier missions; a soldier’s death, recounted at the end of the book, in fact precedes most of the other action. Yet, the subversion of a standard chronological sequence does not necessarily make the
novel less accessible. Taken in the light of the novel’s subject—the insanity of war—Joseph Heller’s decision to depart from a conventional plot structure seems perfectly natural. Indeed, the unconventional storyline captures something of the turmoil inherent in his protagonist, Yossarian.
A psychiatrist diagnoses Yossarian at one point with a "morbid aversion to
dying." There is little doubt about Yossarian’s unwillingness to fight. He feigns sickness, shows up naked for inspection, fakes equipment failure, and puts soap in the squadron’s mashed potatoes—all attempts to avoid one mission or another. He also entreats Major Major (who earned his rank through a computer with a sense of humor), Milo Minderbinder, and the chaplain to speak to Colonel Cathcart about his cruel habit of increasing the required missions just when Yossarian is about to finish. Cathcart is unshakable, however, and Yossarian ends up flying nearly eighty missions. As a bombardier, he has numbed himself to the destruction that he causes, although he is acutely aware of the threat to his own life. "They’re trying to kill me," Yossarian complains early in the novel, unconsoled by the knowledge that the Germans are also trying to kill everyone else. Yet, something keeps Yossarian from simply leaving, or refusing to fly, until the end of the novel. It is true that he fears personal retribution, but he also acts with some unaccountable faith in others. He feels genuine compassion for dead and dying soldiers, expects (even in the end) that a murderer will be held accountable, and chooses to desert rather than to accept a deal that would allow Cathcart to continue exploiting the other men in the squadron. Yossarian retains a vestige of moral sense in a world that has shirked it.
Intertwined with Yossarian’s story are those of the people around him—generals concerned more with fighting one another than the Germans; a doctor who thinks that his own situation is incomparably worse than that of his patients; a hospitalized soldier who may or may not exist underneath a full-body cast; and Milo Minderbinder, who will sell military plans as readily as Egyptian cotton. These characters and their stories are not truly secondary, because they prove relevant to Yossarian. For example, the pilot Orr, whose habits of stuffing his cheeks with crab apples and crashing his plane appear absurd and random, is actually planning for his own escape, which in turn inspires Yossarian.
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