Catch-22

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1961

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-11

Chapters 12-20

Chapters 21-25

Chapters 26-31

Chapters 32-42

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

The Senselessness of War

Catch-22 explores the senselessness of war. Yossarian and the other airmen are caught in the midst of a war that makes no sense to them. They are confronted daily by absurd bureaucracy and meaningless violence. With the enemy almost defeated and the goals of the war vague, the men are engaged in an empty, facile pursuit in which the commanders care only about petty disputes and promotions. Scheisskopf has his parades, Peckem has his bombing patterns, and Cathcart has his desperate desire to be noticed. All three commanders direct missions in which men die, but none of them are invested in actually winning the war. Instead, it is the commanding officers’ vapid pursuits that direct the men’s fates. Even Peckem’s concept of “bomb patterns” is a meaningless (and massively fatal) joke to amuse one man. This senselessness is compounded by the narrative’s nonlinear structure, in which there is no discernable progress and the missions meander Italy without advancement. Every supposed victory is tinged with defeat and death because the war has no actual objective. Similarly, the men never encounter any enemy because their real enemy is the high command. In the war, nothing makes sense, and the only achievements are trauma, pain, and death.

The war’s absurdity has real consequences for those involved. Peckem might find his bomb pattern joke amusing, and Scheisskopf may obsess over his parades, but these pursuits cost their inferiors’ lives. Characters slowly disappear until Yossarian realizes that he is almost completely alone. Orr, Clevinger, McWatt, Kid Sampson, Hungry Joe, and Nately are all killed or otherwise disappear on futile missions. The true senselessness of the war is that the cost is never justified. Yossarian struggles to make sense of the war because there is no sense in how the men die for nothing. This senselessness traumatizes Yossarian, who is haunted by others’ needless deaths. Achieving no truly meaningful military victories, the missions present an abjectly absurd economy: Paying with the men’s lives as currency, the military purchases nothing.

To the people of Italy, the war is even more pointless. The nation is a defeated player in the war and is now caught between the retreating Germans and the advancing Americans. While the Italian institutions may have crumbled, the people are forced to live in the ruins of the state. Luciana has the physical scars to remind her of this conflict; American bombers in Napoli were supposed to liberate her and her family but instead left her forever scarred. The Italian people are starved, brutalized, and forced into sex work to try to survive. The Americans may present themselves as saviors, but they harm, exploit, and abuse the Italians. Aarfy murders a woman, sex workers face routinely abuse, and the military police do nothing to stop the violence. The war’s senselessness is in the treatment of those on whose behalf the war is supposedly being fought. The United States functions as an instrument of senseless violence and suffering, becoming the very thing it sought to defeat.

Remaining “Sane” in an “Insane” World

A theme of “insanity” may be evident from even a cursory scan through the novel, as the word “crazy” appears over 100 times. Heller uses these terms in a sense that is, at least superficially, quite vague. Neither term is clinically appropriate, and the novel’s concept of literal “craziness” seems an indiscriminate conflation of psychiatric conditions involving either hallucinations, delusions, or some other detachment from reality. However, while the literal level is nebulous, Heller’s concept of “insanity” carries more precise symbolism. In Catch-22, the concept stands for at least two things. First, it stands for absurdity: paralyzing circularity; nonsense that is somehow both contradictory and irrefutable; self-defeating, self-perpetuating wasteful gambits. The second sense: the awareness of that absurdity (an awareness that is therefore, paradoxically, a kind of “sanity”).

Yossarian’s “insanity” accords with the second sense, as it entails his awareness of the absurdity of the world he inhabits. He is the protagonist of the novel, but he is frequently told that he has “lost his mind,” and his behavior suggests that he struggles to make sense of the world. The nonlinear narrative structure reflects Yossarian’s profound psychological disruption: Like Yossarian’s thoughts, the novel’s structure does not proceed in a straight line. Instead, the world is portrayed through digressions, obsessions, traumatic memories, and distractions. The structure suggests that Yossarian’s very sense of reality has been derailed by the “insanity” of the world; Yossarian’s distress, however, is due to his highly intact, rational awareness of the war’s real horror. He is therefore not only coherent but made to suffer for it.

Yossarian struggles to stay alive but also to stay in touch with reality. He does not always succeed in this regard as he struggles to cope with his traumas. Snowden’s death, for example, leads to him sitting naked in a tree. His behavior seems nonsensical to others, but the novel gradually reveals not only the logic but the humanity behind Yossarian’s actions—a sense and empathy wholly lacking in the military bureaucracy. His uniform was stained with Snowden’s blood, and, during Snowden’s funeral service, Yossarian cannot tolerate this trigger. He sits naked in the tree because he is deeply affected by the senselessness (or “insanity”) of the war’s violence. Others interpret Yossarian’s response to that senselessness as the behavior of an “insane” man, simply because he is rebuking the absurdity of the war rather than internalizing the chaos like Orr, McWatt, or Cathcart.

The novel’s literal sense of “insanity” plays into its symbolic sense. Doc Daneeka explains to Yossarian that the military has specific rules governing literal “insanity,” but the rules themselves are “insane” or absurd, thus the paradox of this Catch-22. Yossarian is forced to confront the idea that this bureaucracy, though nonsensical, holds the power of life and death over him. Furthermore, the other characters are completely invested in this bureaucracy. They have internalized the rules and happily abide by the governing principles. Cathcart wants his promotion, for example, so he exploits and exacerbates the bureaucracy’s senselessness. Given that this world itself is “insane,” Yossarian begins to realize, trying to remain “sane” is counterproductive: The entire wartime cosmos is governed by illogic, so the only people who succeed are those who engage that illogic.

Yossarian is deeply affected by trauma, to the point where his behavior leads many to pathologize his mental state. However, no one believes that this should excuse Yossarian from his duties. Only when Yossarian refuses to take part in the missions—when he takes the most rational possible course of action—does he effectively challenge the irrationality of the world around him. This, too, cannot last. The problem of trying to remain “sane” in an “insane” world, Yossarian discovers, is that “insanity” cannot be reasoned with.

Bureaucracy as Infernal Purgatory

Heller was not Catholic, nor does Catholicism explicitly appear in the novel (other than the chaplain insisting that he is not Catholic). At the same time, the soldiers are stationed in Rome—the most Catholic site on earth—and, more than once, purgatorial allusions appear as characters figuratively allude to the possibility of themselves or others already being dead. Likewise, the novel features states of indeterminacy between life and death; the Soldier in White is a point of confusion, and the deceased Mudd’s belongings cause Mudd to get caught in the dreadful liminal space of Yossarian’s tormented consciousness (as well as the liminal space of administrative error, though this somewhat recalls limbo more than purgatory).

In Catholicism, purgatory is a state of suffering that sinners must endure before they are permitted to ascend into heaven. After a sinner dies, they spend an unspecified amount of time in the state of purgatory to atone for their sins and become purified (or purged, hence the name purgatory). In Catch-22, the war is like a purgatorial state for the men who, through endless missions, are trying to qualify for passage to their next state of being. However, unlike the Catholic theology of souls in purgatory, the men have no real chance of salvation. They are trapped by the bureaucracy of the military and forced to fly missions until they earn the approval of the high command, but the mission quota always rises because the previous quota was a false promise to begin with. With every completed mission, the men’s only reward is to be one step closer to another extended sentence in their absurd imprisonment; their “purgation” therefore further damns them, as this system creates an inescapable purgatory filled with paradoxes and self-justifying rules that exist only to ensure that the men cannot escape. The military bureaucracy is ultimately as infernal as it is purgatorial. The entrapment and futility most resemble hell, but—unlike damned souls—the men still long for salvation, to return home.

Yossarian is caught in this infernal purgatory. The only way to leave the military is to complete the required number of missions or to die. Given that Cathcart continually raises the mission quota, death is the only true escape. Any other exit is blocked off by the bureaucracy. Daneeka explains to Yossarian that he cannot be declared “insane,” for example, due to Catch-22. Similar rules exist to trap the men and force them to either continue to fight in the war or to die trying. The infernal purgatorial nature of the bureaucracy serves only to punish the men. Moreover, the men are not sinless; the violence they inflict on others is tantamount to sin and a justification for their punishment. Their treatment of the Italian women, for example, is little more than violent exploitation. Luciana’s scars also show that the American bombing campaigns are harming the people they are supposedly trying to liberate. Though this violence is not logically linked to its “punishment” of increased missions, there is a sense of cosmic proportionality in the punishment as penance—even while this penance furthers the violence.

As Yossarian realizes toward the end of the novel, the true paradox of this purgatory is that the only way to escape is to not atone. His refusal to fly missions becomes an existential threat to the bureaucracy. Yossarian is nearly permitted to leave the military because he might expose the military’s self-serving, self-perpetuating antics. Only by recognizing the hellish nature of the bureaucracy itself can the men hope to escape the infernal purgatorial state. While men like Orr willingly engage with the bureaucracy and men like Clevinger try to reason with it, Yossarian’s escape route is the only one that makes sense. Even though when he leaves the hospital he is immediately attacked, his morality remains intact. He learns that the only answer to the purgatorial bureaucracy is to refute it entirely and to be his own savior.