Catch 22

3 Pages 645 Words

When Heller began his writing career in the late 1940s, he turned his back on traditional methods of story telling. He seemed to resent the "realism" of the conventional mode of fiction with its rational structure, its assumptions of continuity in plot, situation, and character, and its neat attempts to draw well-defined resolutions. His own experience as an airman in World War II caused him to distrust the cause-and effect relation of surface reality as something merely superficial which captured only outer reality. So in his fiction, Heller developed a structure and style that suited the absurdities in public and private life that he observed around him.

The dislocation of episodic continuity serves a dual purpose. Some of the events are juxtaposed not on the basis of chronology but randomly so as to highlight their inter-relationship and to emphasize certain ironic contrasts.

Besides, the episodes of the novel are so structured as to create a gradually increasing tension through the sinister events represented in them. Heller gives us several accounts, scattered over various chapters, of the catastrophic events in Yossarian’s plane leading up to a death. Each attempt at narrating the gory details serves to intensify the traumatic impact it has on the morale and psyche of Yossarian.

The overall time structure of the novel does acquire some chronological continuity through the intermittent repetition of certain crucial incidents. Recurrent references include the monumental growth of Minderbinder’s black-market operations,
the death of Snowden; Cathcart’s rising of the number of missions, and Orr’s repeated ditching of his planes at sea.

Catch-22 depicts the absurdities and excesses of life in wartime conditions; on the other hand, it castigates the insanity and inhumanity of bureaucratic systems both in wartime and in peace. It is not surprising, then that the postwar generation of the
1950s and 1960s identi...