![]() Heller's biting sense of humor may have been influenced by growing up in this somewhat surrealistic, carnival-like neighborhood.Īfter his 1941 high school graduation, Heller worked in an insurance office for a short time. This oceanside town had a large population of Russian Jewish immigrants, including Heller's parents, and was known for its amusement park. Joseph Heller was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1923 and grew up in Coney Island. Heller's questioning of these respected institutions, and of war in general, foreshadowed the social protests and antiwar movements of the late 1960s, and made it one of the most popular and enduring novels of its time. Heller uses black humor, absurd and even surreal events, and a nonlinear narrative structure in which events are arranged by theme rather than by chronology, to drive home his point that institutions such as the military, big business, government, and religion are corrupt and individuals must find their own responses to this corruption. Yossarian's questions and responses to his situation show that he is indeed a sane man in an insane situation. The circular reasoning of this "catch" is the central metaphor for the absurdity of war and the military bureaucracy. Only a crazy man would want to continue to fly missions, but the only way Daneeka can ground him, according to Catch-22, is if he asks to be grounded-which would indicate his sanity. Doc refuses, citing the mysterious Catch-22: if Yossarian asks to be let out of his duties, he must be sane. He asks the squadron's doctor, Doc Daneeka, to declare him unfit for duty by reason of insanity. Consequently, Yossarian is desperate to find another way out of his dilemma. His commander, Colonel Cathcart, keeps raising the number of missions the men in the squadron must fly before they can be rotated out. He is obsessed with being rotated out of active flight duty. The completed novel was published in 1961.Īmerican army pilot John Yossarian is an antihero, that is, a protagonist lacking some traditionally heroic qualities. Heller began writing Catch-22 in 1953, and a chapter from the still-in-progress novel was published in an anthology in 1955. It features black humor, an unusual narrative structure, surrealism (a genre which features strange imagery and events), and a not-so-heroic protagonist who struggles to deal with the insanity of war and concludes that the only sane response to it is not to participate in it. Set toward the end of World War II in 1944, on an island off the coast of Italy, Joseph Heller's Catch-22 is a satirical antiwar novel.
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