Catch-22

Life:
Joseph Heller (May 1, 1923 – December
12, 1999) was an American satirical novelist, short story writer and playwright.
He wrote the influential novel Catch-22 about American servicemen during
World War II. The title of this work entered the English lexicon to refer to absurd, no-win choices, particularly in situations in which the desired outcome of the choice is an impossibility,

and regardless of choice, the same negative outcome is a certainty.
Heller is widely regarded as one of the best post-World War II satirists.
Although he is remembered primarily for Catch-22 , his other works center on the lives of various members of the middle class and remain exemplars of modern satire.

Early years:
Joseph Heller was born in Coney
Island in Brooklyn, New York, the son of poor Jewish parents from
Russia. Even as a child, he loved to write; as a teenager, he wrote a story about the Russian invasion of
Finland and sent it to New York
Daily News , which rejected it.

After graduating from Abraham
Lincoln High School in 1941, Heller spent the next year working as a blacksmith's apprentice, a messenger boy, and a filing clerk. In 1942, at age
19, he joined the U.S. Army Air Corps.
Two years later he was sent to Italian
Front, where he flew 60 combat missions as a B-25 bombardier.

Heller later remembered the war as
"fun in the beginning... You got the feeling that there was something glorious about it." On his return home he "felt like a hero... People think it quite remarkable that I was in combat in an airplane and I flew sixty missions even though I tell them that the missions were largely milk runs."

After the war, Heller studied English at the University of Southern California and
NYU on the G.I. Bill. In 1949, he received his M.A. in English from Columbia
University. Following his graduation, he spent a year as a Fulbright scholar at St.
Catherine's College in Oxford
University.After returning home, he taught composition at Penn State
University for two years.

He then briefly worked for Time, Inc., before taking a job as a copywriter at a small advertising agency, where he worked alongside future novelist
Mary Higgins Clark. At home, Heller would write. He was first published in 1948, when The Atlantic ran one of his short stories. That first story nearly won the "Atlantic First."

On Sunday, December 13, 1981, Heller was diagnosed with Guillain-Barr é syndrome, a debilitating syndrome that was to leave him temporarily paralyzed.
Heller eventually made a substantial recovery. In 1984, while in the process of divorcing his wife of 35 years, he met
Valerie Humphries, the nurse who had helped him to recover, and later married her.

Later years:
Heller returned to St. Catherine's as a visiting Fellow, for a term, in 1991 and was appointed an Honorary Fellow of the college. In 1998, he released a memoir, Now and Then: From Coney
Island to Here, in which he relived his childhood as the son of a deliveryman and offered some details about the inspirations for Catch-22 .

He died of a heart attack at his home in East Hampton, on Long Island, in
December 1999, shortly after the completion of his final novel,
. On hearing of Heller's death, his friend
Kurt Vonnegut said, "Oh, God, how terrible. This is a calamity for
American letters.

Works

Short stories ：
Catch As Catch Can: The Collected
Stories and Other Writings (2003)

Autobiographies ：
No Laughing Matter (1986)
Now And Then (1998)

Novels ：
Catch-22 (1961)
Something Happened (1974)
Good as Gold (1979)
God Knows (1984)
Picture This (1988)
Closing Time (1994)
Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man
(2000)

Plays:
We Bombed in New Haven (1967)
Catch 22 (1973)
Clevinger's Trial (1973)

Screenplays:
Sex and the Single Girl (1964)
Casino Royale (1967)
Dirty Dingus Magee (1970)

Catch-22

Catch-22 is a satirical, historical novel by the
American author Joseph Heller, first published in 1961. The novel, set during the later stages of World War II from 1944 onwards, is frequently cited as one of the great literary works of the twentieth century.It has a distinctive non-chronological style where events are described from different characters' points of view and out of sequence so that the time line develops along with the plot.

The novel follows Yossarian, a U.S.
Army Air Forces B-25 bombardier, and a number of other characters.
Most events occur while the airmen of the fictional 256th squadron are based on the island of Pianosa, in the
Mediterranean Sea west of Italy.

Concept:
Among other things, Catch-22 is a general critique of bureaucratic operation and reasoning. Resulting from its specific use in the book, the phrase
"Catch-22" is common idiomatic usage meaning "a no-win situation" or "a double bind" of any type. Within the book, "Catch-22" is a military rule, the self-contradictory circular logic that, for example, prevents anyone from avoiding combat missions.

In Heller's own words:
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.

Other forms of Catch-22 are invoked throughout the novel to justify various bureaucratic actions. At one point, victims of harassment by military police quote the MPs' explanation of one of
Catch-22's provisions: "Catch-22 states that agents enforcing Catch-22 need not prove that Catch-22 actually contains whatever provision the accused violator is accused of violating."

Another character explains: "Catch-
22 says they have a right to do anything we can ’ t stop them from doing." The theme of a bureaucracy marginalizing the individual in an absurd way is similar to the world of
Kafka's The Trial , and George
Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four . The concept of 'doublethink' has definite echoes in Heller's work.

Yossarian comes to realize that Catch-22 does not actually exist, but because the powers that be claim it does, and the world believes it does, it nevertheless has potent effects. Indeed, because it does not exist there is no way it can be repealed, undone, overthrown, or denounced. The combination of force with specious legalistic justification is one of the book's primary motifs.

The motif of bureaucratic absurdity is further explored in 1994's Closing
Time , Heller's sequel to Catch-22 .
This darker, slower-paced, apocalyptic novel explores the preand post-war lives of some of the major characters in Catch-22 , with particular emphasis on the relationship between Yossarian and tailgunner Sammy Singer.

Style:
Many events in the book are repeatedly described from differing points of view, so the reader learns more about each event from each iteration, with the new information often completing a joke, the punchline of which was told several chapters previously.

The narrative often describes events out of sequence, but events are referred to as if the reader is already familiar with them, so that the reader must ultimately piece together a timeline of events. Specific words, phrases, and questions are also repeated frequently, generally to comic effect.

Much of Heller's prose in Catch-22 is circular and repetitive, exemplifying in its form the structure of a Catch-22 . Heller revels in paradox, for example: The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous and likable. In three days no one could stand him , and The case against Clevinger was open and shut.
The only thing missing was something to charge him with.
This atmosphere of apparent logical irrationality pervades the whole book.

While a few characters are most prominent, notably Yossarian and the
Chaplain, the majority of named characters are described in a typical extent, with fully fleshed out or multidimensional personas, to the extent that there are few if any
"minor characters".

The seemingly random nonchronological structure to the novel is misleading. Catch 22 is actually highly structured, but it is a structure of free association where ideas run into one another through seemingly random connections. For example, Chapter 1 entitled "The Texan" ends with
"everybody but the CID man, who had caught cold from the fighter captain and come down with pneumonia."

Chapter 2, entitled "Clevinger", begins with "In a way the CID man was pretty lucky, because outside the hospital the war was still going on.
“ The CID man connects the two chapters like a free association bridge and eventually Chapter 2 flows from the CID man to Clevinger through more free association links.

Major themes:
One of the first themes developed in the novel is the question of what is right to do in a basic moral dilemma/social dilemma/prisoner's dilemma; where a person can cooperate with others to their collective greater payoff; or can sell them out by not cooperating, and reap even greater benefits as an individual.

Another theme is the turning on their heads of notions of what people generally think of as morally right or wrong, particularly patriotism and honor, which lead most of the airmen to accept abusive lies and petty rules of bureaucrats, though Yossarian whole-heartedly disregards all such notions.

Heller suggests that bureaucracies often lead organizations, especially when run by bad or insane people, to trivialize important matters (e.g., those affecting life and death), and to grossly exaggerate the importance of trivial matters (e.g., clerical errors).
Everyone in the book, even Yossarian at the beginning, is behaving insanely in their clerical decisions.

List of motifs:
-Sanity and insanity
-Heroes and heroism
-Absurdity and inefficiency of -bureaucracy
-Power of bureaucracy
-Questioning/Loss of religious faith
-Impotence of language

-Inevitability of death
-Distortion of justice
Concept of Catch-22
-Greed
-Personal integrity
-Capital and its amorality

Significant characters

John Yossarian:
（约塞连上尉 )
Captain John Yossarian is a fictional character in Joseph Heller's novel Catch-
22 and its sequel Closing Time , and the protagonist of both books. In Catch-22,
Yossarian is a 28-year-old Captain and
B-25 bombardier in the 256th squadron of the Army Air Corps, stationed on the small island of Pianosa off the Italian mainland during World War II.

Yossarian's exploits are based on the experiences of the author: Heller was also a bombardier in the Air Corps, stationed on an island off the coast of Italy during World War II!

Colonel Cathcart:( 卡斯卡特上校）
A full colonel, Cathcart is a group commander at the U.S. Army Air Corps base in Pianosa and is obsessed with becoming a general. As such, he does whatever it takes to please his superiors — in particular, by repeatedly raising the number of missions the men have to fly to complete a tour of duty, beyond that normally ordered by other outfits.

This becomes the bane of
Yossarian's life, as every time he comes close to obtaining the target number of missions for being sent home, Colonel Cathcart raises the required number again.

Doc Daneeka （丹尼卡医生） is the squadron physician and a friend of the novel's protagonist, Yossarian.
Doc Daneeka's main motivation throughout is for his own welfare, if that be making money or protecting his own life. He generally forgets his moral duty as a physician except in the most extreme of circumstances.

Doc Daneeka feels the military is responsible for him being drafted into the war effort and putting him in harm's way, because they were distrustful of him when he lied on his drafting papers about his health..

He is constantly scared of upsetting his superiors who may see fit to then ship him off to the far more dangerous South Pacific. Already he sees it as military cruelty to have been assigned to the Air Corps even though he is scared of flying

Literary Allusions ：
Catch-22 contains allusions to and draws inspiration from many works of literature, both classical and modern.

Iliad and Odyssey
Heller casts Yossarian as a modern day, anti-heroic version of Homer's hero
Achilles, from the Iliad. Both works begin with the central character refusing to fight. But whereas Achilles heroically re-enters combat in response to the death of his best friend Patroclus, Yossarian is anti-heroically goaded back to combat early on by mere bureaucratic pressure.

Towards the end of the novel, after the death of Nately, he resolutely refuses to fly more missions.
Achilles is promised either fame or a long life, and chooses fame;
Yossarian, conversely, chooses life.

Crime and Punishment
In a dialogue between Clevinge and Yossarian, allusion is made to
Dostoevsky's Crime and
Punishment , where Yossarian is portrayed as a mirror of
Raskolnikov.

Explanation of the novel's title:
The title is a reference to a fictional bureaucratic stipulation which embodies multiple forms of illogical and immoral reasoning. That the catch is named exposes the high level of absurdity in the novel, where bureaucratic nonsense has risen to a level at which even the catches are codified with numbers.

Literary significance and criticism:
As commented on by Joseph Heller himself in the preface to Catch-22 from 1994 onwards, the novel prompted polarized responses upon its first publication in the United
States.
Reviews in publications ranged from the very positive; The Nation ("was the best novel to come out in years"),

the New York Herald Tribune ("A wild, moving, shocking, hilarious, raging, exhilarating, giant roller-coaster of a book") and the New York Times ("A dazzling performance that will outrage nearly as many readers as it delights") to the highly negative; The New Yorker
("doesn't even seem to be written; instead, it gives the impression of having been shouted onto paper," "what remains is a debris of sour jokes")

and from another critic of the New
York Times ("is repetitive and monotonous. Or one can say that it is too short because none of its many interesting characters and actions is given enough play to become a controlling interest").

Although the novel won no awards at publication, it has stood the test of time and is seen as one of the most significant novels of the 20th century.
Scholar and fellow World War II veteran Hugh Nibley said it was the most accurate book he ever read about the military.

Adaptations:
Catch-22 was adapted into a feature film of the same name in 1970, directed by Mike Nichols.
Heller also dramatised his own novel for the stage, and wrote another short play, Clevinger's Trial , that was based on scenes from Catch-22 .

Aquila Theatre produced a stage adaptation of Catch-22 directed by
Peter Meineck and based on Heller's own play which he wrote in 1971. This production toured the USA in 2007/8 with a New York City production in the fall of 2008.

There was also a brief television comedy series based upon Catch-22 made and televised in 1973, with
Richard Dreyfuss in the starring role of Capt. Yossarian.
Catch-22 is also the name of a ska band from New Jersey that takes the name of the book.