t”You mean there’s a catch?”“Sure there’s a catch, “ Doc Daneeka replied. “Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn’t really crazy.”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. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle. “That’s some catch, that Catch-22,” He observed.“It’s the best there is,” Doc Daneeka agreed. Originally Catch-22 was Catch-18, but because Leon Uris was publishing a novel called Mila-18 that same year Joseph Heller’s agent decided the title needed to be changed so as to not confuse the book buying public. Also given that 22 is a double 11 they liked the way it represented the many déjà vu moments that occur in the book. The East Coast publishing intelligentsia really embraced the book even though there were doubts if it would ever gain traction with the American public. It did.I understand the frustration that publishers feel with the American book buying public. They have all been scorched by a book they felt should have sold by the wheelbarrow only to have it crash and burn with the majority of the first printing sold off to a remainder company. Sometimes a book needs a lightning strike in the form of Oprah or a school banning the book (thank-you Strongsville, OH), but for Heller all he needed was the 1960s. The book is set during WWII, the last good war according to everyone from Tom Brokaw to the school janitor at Phillipsburg High School. Fat novels glorifying the war, some extraordinarily good, were hitting bookstores at a fast clip from the late 1940s on. By the time Catch-22 came out in 1961 the world had changed. So those people who bought this book who thought they were in for another “weren’t we great” novel about World War Two were in for a shock. A typical reaction was:WTF????Some thought it was irreverent, but there were a growing group of people who thought it was among the best American novels they had ever read. Both reactions helped juice the novel and sales began to climb. Joseph Heller in uniform.At the tender age of 19 in 1942 Joseph Heller joined the U.S. Army Air Corp. By 1944 he found himself on the Italian Front as a B-25 Bombardier. He flew 60 missions most of which he categorized as milk runs; these were flight missions that encounter no or very little anti-aircraft artillery or enemy fighters. Heller admits that his disillusionment with the war in Korea colored the novel. It gives me the shakes to think how different the novel would be if he had published the book in 1951 instead of 1961. Little did he know how prophetic his novel would be regarding the Vietnam War. Yossarian has reached the end of his rope. He has flown the required number of combat missions several times, but each time Colonel Cathcart keeps raising the number of missions required to go home. A similar circumstance plagued Hawkeye Pierce and his fellow doctors in the Korean War based TV series M*A*S*H. The pressure of thousands of people he doesn’t even know and hundreds he does know trying to kill him is just too much for him to bear. As he becomes more and more insane(sane) he becomes more and more qualified to fly combat missions as far as the military is concerned. He comes up with various ailments to keep him in the hospital. He shows up to receive his war medal naked except for a pair of moccasins. He finally refuses to fly any more missions and begins parading around the camp walking backwards. This does start to foment rebellion among his fellow flyers and drives Colonel Cathcart to distraction. ”Morale was deteriorating and it was all Yossarian’s fault. The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them.”Heller surrounds Yossarian with a wonderful cast of detailed characters of which I will only be able to mention a few. Lieutenant Nately is one of Yossarian’s best friends, a trust fund baby with red, white, and blue blood running through his veins. He is a good looking kid and could have any woman he wanted, but he falls in love with an Italian prostitute who begrudgingly sleeps with him when he pays for sex with her, but would rather he just disappeared. He has this great discussion with her “107” year old pimp. t”Italy is one of the least prosperous nations on earth. And the Italian fighting man is probably second to all. And that’s exactly why my country is doing so well in this war while your country is doing so poorly.”Nately guffawed with surprise...”But Italy was occupied by the Germans and is now being occupied by us. You don’t call that doing very well, do you?”“But of course I do.” exclaimed the old man cheerfully. “The Germans are being driven out, and we are still here. In a few years you will be gone, too, and we will still be here. You see, Italy is really a very poor and weak country, and that’s what makes us so strong. Italian soldiers are not dying any more. But American and German soldiers are. I call that doing extremely well.”Nately continues to be the straight man for the old man as they discuss the absurdity of risking one’s life for their country.t”There is nothing so absurd about risking your life for your country.” he (Nately) declared.“Isn’t there?”asked the old man. “What is a country? A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural. Englishmen are dying for England, Americans are dying for America, Germans are dying for Germany, Russians are dying for Russia. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can’t all be worth dying for.”“Anything worth living for,” said Nately, “is worth dying for.”“And anything worth dying for,” answered the sacrilegious old man. “is certainly worth living for.”Milo Minderbinder is in charge of the mess at the U.S. Army Corps base. As he learns more and more about how goods are moved around the globe he begins a business of supply and demand (war profiteering). He becomes the ultimate capitalist with no allegiance to any country. He trades with the enemy and as part of contract negotiations he also warns the Germans once of an impending attack even to the point of guiding anti-artillery against American planes and in another case bombs his own base to fulfill another contract. The absurdity of his position is that he is too important to the American high command to get in trouble for any of these acts of treason. He tries to explain one of his more successful schemes to Yossarian. t”I don’t understand why you buy eggs for seven cents apiece in Malta and sell them for five cents.”“I do it to make a profit.”“But how can you make a profit? You lose two cents an egg.”“But I make a profit of three and a quarter cents an egg by selling them for four and a quarter cents an egg to the people in Malta I buy them from for seven cents an egg. Of course, I don’t make the profit. the syndicate makes the profit. And everybody has a share.”Yossarian felt he was beginning to understand. “And the people you sell the eggs to at four anda quarter cents a piece make a profit of two and three quarter cents apiece when they sell them back to you at seven cents apiece. Is that right? Why don’t you sell the eggs directly to you and eliminate the people you buy them from?”“Because I’m the people I buy them from.” Milo explained. “I make a profit of three and a quarter cents apiece when I sell them to me and a profit of two and three quarter cents apiece when I buy them back from me. That’s a total profit of six cents and egg. I lose only two cents an egg when I sell them to the mess halls at five cents apiece, and that’s how I can make a profit buying eggs for seven cents apiece and selling them for five cents apiece.Hungry Joe keeps meeting the flight standards time and time again only to have his paperwork take too long to process before the flight standards have been raised again. He packs and then he unpacks. He is a fat, pervert who convinces women to take their clothes off to be photographed by telling them that he works for Life Magazine and will put them on the cover. Unfortunately the photographs never turn out. Ironically he did work as a photographer for Life Magazine before the war. Women do play a role in this book mostly as objects of lust. Heller has these wonderful, creative descriptions of them. ”She would have been perfect for Yossarian, a debauched, coarse, vulgar, amoral, appetizing slattern whom he had longed for and idolized for months. She was a real find. She paid for her own drinks, and she had an automobile, an apartment and a salmon-colored cameo ring that drove Hungry Joe clean out of his senses with its exquisitely carved figures of a naked boy and girl on a rock.”And then there is a nurse that brings Yossarian nearly to his knees with desire. ”Yossarian was sick with lust and mesmerized with regret. General Dreedle’s nurse was only a little chubby, and his senses were stuffed to congestion with the yellow radiance of her hair and the unfelt pressure of her soft short fingers, with the rounded untasted wealth of her nubile breast in her Army-pink shirt that was opened wide at the the throat and with the rolling, ripened triangular confluences of her belly and thighs in her tight, slick forest-green garbardine officer’s pants. He drank her in insatiably from head to painted toenail. He never wanted to lose her. ‘Ooooooooooooh,’ he moaned again, and this time the whole room rippled at his quavering, drown-out cry.”.You will probably need to google the next one. ”He enjoyed Nurse Sue Ann Druckett’s long white legs and supple, callipygous ass.”Paradoxes abound even when Heller describes a character he will have countering characteristics like she was plain, but pretty or he was handsome, but ugly. Aren’t we all a sum of those characteristics anyway? Joseph Heller looking handsome and ugly.This book is hilarious, (I laughed out loud at several points.)but wrapped with increasingly more tragic circumstances. As Yossarian’s friends die or disappear his desperation increases. His behavior becomes more and more erratic. The absurd traps him time and time again. There are a whole host of reasons why everyone should read this novel. I’m not saying that everyone will like it as much as I did, but it is IMHO one of the top five most important American novels ever written. It impacted our culture, added words to our language, and gave voice to a generation of people dissatisfied with the war aims of this country. More importantly don’t be the one person in the middle of a Catch-22 discussion who hasn’t read the book. If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.comI also have a Facebook blogger page at: https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten
Catch-22: The classic satire on war, bureaucracy, and hypocrisyThis is the all-time classic that introduced one of the most iconic and relevant phrases of our modern existence, Catch-22, an illogical or impossible situation from which you cannot extricate yourself. I've wanted to read it forever and never gotten around to it (it’s pretty hefty and not SF), but I felt like it was my patriotic duty as an American to read this brilliant and scathing critique of the American military bureaucracy. I’m glad I did it.I listened to the audiobook narrated by actor Jay O. Sanders, and he does an amazing job with over a dozen characters, giving each a distinct voice and tone. Being a satire of the absurd contradictions we subject ourselves to everyday, it's funny in a dark and subversive way. Written back in 1961, well before the counter-culture revolution, it was pretty ahead of its time and gained a massive cult following among college students who felt it articulated their opposition to US involvement in the Korean and Vietnam Wars. So strangely enough, though it is set during WWII, it’s real target is the Cold War and McCarthyism that came after.The story has a huge cast of outrageous, absurd, but thoroughly believable characters, including Captain Yossarian, Chaplain Tappman, Colonel Cathcart, Doc Daneeka, Milo Minderbinder, Lieutenant Nately, Nately’s whore, Nurse Duckett, Dunbar, Havermeyer, Hungry Joe, Orr, Lieutenant Scheisskopf, Captain Aardvark, Appleby, Captain Black, Colonel Cargill, Colonel Korn, Clevinger, Major Danby, Major —— de Coverley, General Dreedle, General Peckem, and the best-named character of all time, Major Major Major Major. Not a single one of which would have been found in a John Wayne movie like the Green Berets. Joseph Heller has managed to write a 453-page book about war without almost no scenes of combat, and the only real enemies are the ridiculous, self-serving majors and generals that continue to raise the number of combat missions that the pilots of the 256th squadron need to fly before being transferred home. The novel is relentlessly character-driven, with each man’s backstory, motivations, weaknesses, hypocrisies, and thoughts exhaustively described.Captain John Yossarian is the central character, and perhaps the closest proxy to the author’s opinions, as he continually questions the logic behind the war and the decisions of his superiors. He is constantly trying to find ways to avoid flying more combat missions, but Colonel Cathcart is always one step ahead, lifting the quota for his own aggrandizement. The narrative is non-linear and fragmented, and we see Yossarian encountering the same crazy illogic of Catch-22 at every turn, since it permeates every single aspect of the military that is carrying out the war. It becomes very clear early on that while the higher ranking officers always claim to be pursuing the war effort on behalf of US freedom and democracy, they are really pursuing their own careers and interests. There is not a single one that isn’t using the principle of Catch-22 to justify the most preposterous policies, which invariably result in more casualties for enlisted men while they sit behind desks and sign orders and eat meals of contraband luxury items in their quarters.This book, along with Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, represents some of the most powerful criticism in 20th century American literature, of the military-industrial complex and bureaucracy’s amazing ability to perpetuate itself at the expense of the people it is supposed to serve. It may be rambling and overlong, but the number of priceless quotes and Kafkaesque situations of existential horror distinguish it as one of the great works of post-war fiction.Here are some of my favorite quotes from the book, which often remind me of the timeless wisdom of Yogi Berra:“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. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle. "That's some catch, that Catch-22," he observed. "It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed.”“What a lousy earth! He wondered how many people were destitute that same night even in his own prosperous country, how many homes were shanties, how many husbands were drunk and wives socked, and how many children were bullied, abused, or abandoned. How many families hungered for food they could not afford to buy? How many hearts were broken? How many suicides would take place that same night, how many people would go insane? How many cockroaches and landlords would triumph? How many winners were losers, successes failures, and rich men poor men? How many wise guys were stupid? How many happy endings were unhappy endings? How many honest men were liars, brave men cowards, loyal men traitors, how many sainted men were corrupt, how many people in positions of trust had sold their souls to bodyguards, how many had never had souls? How many straight-and-narrow paths were crooked paths? How many best families were worst families and how many good people were bad people? When you added them all up and then subtracted, you might be left with only the children, and perhaps with Albert Einstein and an old violinist or sculptor somewhere.”“It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.”“Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. With Major Major it had been all three. Even among men lacking all distinction he inevitably stood out as a man lacking more distinction than all the rest, and people who met him were always impressed by how unimpressive he was.”“Catch-22 did not exist, he was positive of that, but it made no difference. What did matter was that everyone thought it existed, and that was much worse, for there was no object or text to ridicule or refute, to accuse, criticize, attack, amend, hate, revile, spit at, rip to shreds, trample upon or burn up.”“Men," he began his address to the officers, measuring his pauses carefully. "You're American officers. The officers of no other army in the world can make that statement. Think about it.”“To Yossarian, the idea of pennants as prizes was absurd. No money went with them, no class privileges. Like Olympic medals and tennis trophies, all they signified was that the owner had done something of no benefit to anyone more capably than everyone else.”“History did not demand Yossarian's premature demise, justice could be satisfied without it, progress did not hinge upon it, victory did not depend on it. That men would die was a matter of necessity; WHICH men would die, though, was a matter of circumstance, and Yossarian was willing to be the victim of anything but circumstance. But that was war. Just about all he could find in its favor was that it paid well and liberated children from the pernicious influence of their parents.”“What the hell are you getting so upset about?' he asked her bewilderedly in a tone of contrive amusement. 'I thought you didn't believe in God.'I don't,' she sobbed, bursting violently into tears. 'But the God I don't believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He's not the mean and stupid God you make Him to be.'Yossarian laughed and turned her arms loose. 'Let's have a little more religious freedom between us,' he proposed obligingly. 'You don't believe in the God you want to, and I won't believe in the God I want to . Is that a deal?”“Major Major had lied, and it was good. He was not really surprised that it was good, for he had observed that people who did lie were, on the whole, more resourceful and ambitious and successful than people who did not lie.”“Colonel Cargill was so awful a marketing executive that his services were much sought after by firms eager to establish losses for tax purposes. His prices were high, for failure often did not come easily. He had to start at the top and work his way down, and with sympathetic friends in Washington, losing money was no simple matter. It took months of hard work and careful misplanning. A person misplaced, disorganized, miscalculated, overlooked everything and open every loophole, and just when he thought he had it made, the government gave him a lake or a forest or an oilfield and spoiled everything. Even with such handicaps, Colonel Cargill could be relied on to run the most prosperous enterprise into the ground. He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody.”
What do You think about Catch-22 (2004)?
Single Quote Review:"...even to laugh is only an imperfect expression of the real ridicule of life. For it to be perfect one ought properly to be serious. The most perfect mockery of life would be if the person who propounded the deepest truth were not a dreamer but a doubter. And that isn’t inconceivable, for no one can propound the positive truth as excellently as a doubter, except that he himself doesn’t believe in it. If he were a hypocrite the joke would be on him; if he were a doubter who perhaps wanted to believe what he doubted, the mockery would be entirely objective, existence would be mocking itself through him; he would be propounding a doctrine able to explain everything and the whole race could repose in it, but this doctrine could not explain its own founder. Were a person clever enough to conceal the fact of his own madness, he could make the whole world mad."~ Kierkegaard
—Riku Sayuj
Insanity is contagious. O man , it’s really crazy . I doubt if I could say something revealing about Catch 22. It’s been ages I read it for the first time and it was like a breath of fresh air in a stale room. If you grew up in an oppressive country , where a lot of stuff was banned ,when it was safe just not saying about some things ,where mediocrity was a virtue, reading such absurd and grotesque stories allowed you , paradoxically , keep your common sense and ignore awkward reality.Catch-22 is a satirical story about the unit of American bombardiers who, in time of war , are staying on the island of Pianosa on the Mediterranean Sea. The main character of the novel , Yossarian , is a man with morbid aversion to dying. And from the beginning ,with every available way , trying to get permission for return to the country , is on and on impeded by the title Catch-22.Besides him we get to know a colourful collection of characters , to mention : major Major Major Major - like an anguish Henry Fonda, Orr with cheeks like crab apples , Nately who had a bad start because came from a good family , Dunbarr , Texan who turned out to be good-natured, generous and likable. in three days no one could stand him any many others. Oh , and the mysterious soldier in white .Novel ,written in a light and pleasant language ,is divided into chapters ,titled with name of the person whose it refers .The best advantage of the novel is , of course , black humor and an enormous dose of absurdity . In Catch 22 normal people are mistaken for madmen and lunatics for mentally healthy people. But most of all , this is a book which not only amuses the reader , it also shows him the absurdity of the war. By ridiculing grotesque regulations and bureaucracy it helps taming own demons and fears .And undeniably , Heller's black humor , wisdom, and drama are here perfectly mixed.
—Agnieszka
This book is so true, it's ridiculous. This book is so false, it's maddening. Yossarian, our unlikely hero along with his fellow bedmates in a military hospital and later with his platoon , lives amidst shelling, explosions, flying body parts and one very bonkers mess cook. He's an escapist, a realist, a leader and in cases even a pervert turned wannabe saviour. He is mad and then logical, depraved and then conscientious;but all throughout you shall love him. Catch22 is ingenious, hilarious; even though at times it can be bound to repetitive. Of course, some are bound to be exasperated by the way the entire book seems to be a testament to the different ways Heller can make use of the phrase 'catch - 22' but persevere and you shall be rewarded with complex and dazzling characters and an utterly ridiculous, gruesome and novel plot! No wonder it made the BBC 100 booklist challenge!
—Annie
