Yossarian's Journey Through the World of Catch-22

Yossarian's Journey through the World of Catch-22

Philosophers and intellectuals have examined man's status as a social being in every era of human history. The three strongest stances on this issue - each overlapping one another to some extent - generated from the Renaissance era, over four hundred years ago. The first viewpoint, proposed by John Locke, was that humans were innately good, and that all humans, through sacrificing some of his individuality to a collective unit of humans called 'society', would gain by moving forward together. The second viewpoint, proposed by Thomas Hobbes, concurs with Locke that man's ideal position is within a society; however, Hobbes argued that humans are essentially evil and that civilization restrains humans from their primitive urges. The third viewpoint - and that most pertinent to Joseph Heller's Catch-22 - was championed by Jean-Paul Rousseau. He agreed with Locke that man was essentially good (thereby disagreeing with Hobbes), and he agreed with Hobbes that society restrains humans from their natural state. However, the natural state Rousseau refers to is the ideal state of man - unrestrained by society, free to do whatever he wishes. In this sense, he disagrees with Locke that sacrificing to the collective results in an advancement of mankind, and founds his own brand of individualism that focuses on man apart from society as man is meant to be. This theme is also central to Catch-22, as Heller asserts man can only save himself from the fetters of society by refusing its dominance over the self. In the novel Catch-22, Yossarian - the protagonist - is a lead bombardier during WWII in the U.S. Air Force in Italy determined to stay alive. Their base in fictitious Pianosa and the military bureaucracy that runs it becomes a metaphor for what Heller considers a dangerously collectivist society. In Catch-22, Yossarian struggles to preserve himself and his sanity in the face of an absurd world run by an amoral bureaucracy. Although he fails to effectively subvert the system while submerged in it, through realizing that saving the spiritual self takes precedence over saving the physical self, he emerges as a manifestation of Heller's morality of refusal by refusing to serve the military and deserting it.

The antihero is a staple of literary absurdism - a type of literature that maintains man's surroundings are indifferent or hostile to his struggles in life. The antihero - as implied by his name - carries nontraditional values and performs non-heroic acts because of his values. In the first half of the novel, Yossarian's antiheroism results from his discontinuous and hostile environment; however, his actions do not properly serve his goal of survival.

To establish a discontinuous environment, Heller employs a seemingly haphazard - but in fact quite structured - style of cyclical narration that adds layers of depth to each event each time around. Although many people have tried to place each event in Catch-22 in 'real time', "the real point to be made about the chronology is that Heller chose not to unravel it... It seems that Heller quite seriously wished to create the impression of chaos or formlessness" (Merrill 39). It makes sense, for the pseudo-formlessness that Heller creates allows him to "introduce numerous repetitions without undue awkwardness" (Merrill 40). Heller uses repetitions - most frequently in the form of dйjÐo vu - to emphasize important events (Potts 28). The first time Heller introduces an event - such as Snowden's death, the soldier in white, Mudd's death - he treats it lightly with a dash of satirical humor, but as the novel proceeds and the passage reappears, the tone darkens and more of the event's true significance appears (Potts 28). Thus, "Heller will never use comedy for its own sake; each joke has a wider significance in the intricate pattern, so that laughter becomes a prologue for some grotesque revelation" (Brustein 30). Heller corroborates this insight with his statement: "I wanted people to laugh and then look back with horror at what they were laughing at" (Merrill 47). One can then conclude that the objective of Heller's cyclical narration is to have the reader see the events upon its first occurrence in the book, and have the reader understand the events upon subsequent repetitions.

Heller establishes an institution reliant on discontinuities as Yossarian's antithesis. Discontinuities are - simply put - disparities between two ideas that logically should be the same. The hallmark of Catch-22's plethora of discontinuities is none other than the title itself. Catch-22, in the novel, is a law created by the military bureaucracy to keep its subjects in check. At first, Heller presents it with a touch of satire, when Yossarian and Doc Daneeka discuss the impossibility of being grounded from missions due to insanity: "There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind' (Heller 55). The implication of this is that a pilot who is insane can ask to be grounded, but as a result of him asking - which by Catch-22 declares him sane - he has to go back on combat status. Catch-22 is a circular trap because the last proposition - that one is not crazy - contradicts the first premise - that one is crazy. At a basic level of understanding, it does not make sense, but as a metaphor of the novel itself, it reflects the closed system that constitutes the fictional world from which there is practically no escape (Hidalgo-Downing 18). Catch-22 reveals that the soldiers are forced to see what they previously thought was a proper relationship between a word and an object - or an event and its interpretation - is instead purely arbitrary and illusionary (Davis 66). Catch-22 itself is not the only example. The opening action of the book presents Yossarian censoring letters: "When he had exhausted all possibilities in the letters, he... [obliterated] whole homes and streets, annihilating entire metropolises with careless flicks of his wrist as though he were God." (Heller 16) The idea Heller presents underneath Yossarian's haphazard censoring of cities and states is that Yossarian, while censoring letters, might as well have destroyed cities simply by crossing out their names. Once they disappear on paper and on bureaucracy records - they might as well just not exist. A similar situation that links the bureaucracy and discontinuity (as well as Yossarian) more closely is the Bologna incident. In the middle of the night, Yossarian "knocked on wood, crossed his fingers, and tiptoed out of his tent to move the bomb line