Catch-22

With its repetition and echoing of phrases, Kafkaesque chronology, and circular logic, Catch-22 illustrates the absurdity of war more than any other novel I have read.

Every time pilot Yossarian, the book’s anti-hero, gets close to flying the number of bombing missions required to go home, the requirement is raised. A paradoxical catch keeps them flying. If you ask to be grounded because you understand the dangers, you aren’t insane. Insane soldiers just need to ask to be grounded. But asking proves you aren’t crazy.

Beneath the absurdist comedy, there is an existential dread at the heart of the book.… show more.

The origin of the phrase “Catch-22” this intriguing spiral into the absurdity of reality, particularly in war, is an exceptional tale.

Although it can be somewhat protracted, it is never boring. Following and recounting the inexplicable and illogical inequalities that life often has to over through the eyes of one ‘Yossarian’, it explores the gauntlet of the commonly uncommon in any form; love, fear, empathy, sympathy, dereliction, sardonicism and, finally, hope.

What truly remained with me was the tone of the book, only changing when truly necessary. For anyone trying to make sense of the chaos of life, dealing with… show more.

This is a startlingly original book I remember first reading it during my A-level studies and thinking wow, what is this Joseph Heller fella doing? Where’s the beginning, middle, and end structure gone? Can you really call a character Major Major and get away with it? It’s beautifully unpredictable and harshly critical of war in its own satirical way. It’s the yardstick for all novels for me. And the source of one of my biggest regrets: not going to a presentation Heller gave in my hometown—Croydon, South London in 1999—just months before he died.

Catch-22 is a laugh-out-loud funny and grotesquely horrific antiwar satire that exposes the absurdity of the military bureaucracy and of war. It focuses on Yossarian, a WWII bombardier who doesn’t want to fly any more missions. The book is so complex and detailed you’ll find something new in it with each reading. The title, meaning a dilemma with no solution, has found its way into the English language—you can look it up in Webster’s. The catch-22 in Catch-22 is this: If you wanted to get out of combat duty you had to be crazy. But anybody who wanted to get… show more.

A classic on the absurdity of war which remains relevant to this day. It also has a really interesting and unique structure—no spoilers, but it’s not exactly linear—which I think of more like a complex painting, each chapter filling in a bit more of the canvas, until by the end you feel like you have the complete picture. Plus, very funny, of course. 

Who wouldn’t want to travel to the island of Pianosa, in the Mediterranean sea south of Elba? There’s an airstrip there full of bombers—the ones that haven’t yet been shot out of the skies—plus a military barracks that’s closer to an insane asylum, and a certain Captain Yossarian, who’s fighting to keep himself, and anyone dumb enough to join him, alive until tomorrow. Not the stuff of a travel book, you say? I don’t care. This is my favorite book ever, a brilliant, brave, side-splitting, troublemaking, groundbreaking epic that redefined both the comic novel and war as well.… show more.

Perhaps one of the most celebrated satires, Catch-22 is dark, philosophical, political, and personal; it’s really everything in one novel. It tells a story in a way that is relatable and conveys real and heavy emotions in a sympathetic light, despite the absurdity it is all framed in. It showed me how much nuance can fit into satire. It showed me how powerful a tool humor can be when used artfully; using it to tell a dark tale in a light way by poking at its absurdity. It manages to pull off a free-flowing story from multiple perspectives in such… show more.

This one saved my summer. I got a job between my junior and senior years in high school loading and unloading heavy boxes at a pharmaceutical company. It was labor intense. My only solace was the 15-minute coffee break and the half-hour lunch break, where I could go off by myself, eat a sandwich, drink an iced coffee, and read Catch-22. I didn’t expect to laugh so hard from a book about WWII, but Heller sublimely captured the absurdity of military life. It made me acutely aware that you could laugh at things that might normally make you shiver… show more.

Heller’s classic is one of the funniest, yet most poignant, stories in American literature. Set in Italy in World War II, it is the tale of a young American airman, Yossarian, who, as his bombing missions increase wants only to survive the insanity of a war being played with ever-changing rules he cannot comprehend. Being able to write such a hysterical work against the backdrop of a world in flames is truly remarkable, yet Heller more than excels at it. You’ll be laughing uncontrollably by the end of the first page.  No library is truly complete without Catch-22. 

Modernity tells us we’re on our own. All our institutions, both splendid and deplorable, are wholly human in origin. Anti-secularists reject this conclusion as opening doors to chaos. And yet Heller never allows his hapless, humanist antihero to embrace nihilism, even though Yossarian is embedded in a nightmare of meaninglessness: Colonel Cathcart perpetually raising the mission quota, Milo Minderbinder arranging an air raid on his own base, Snowden’s insides slithering onto the bomber floor. (Some critics argue that this novel is less about the Mediterranean Theater than the plague of pseudo-rationality—call it Catch-22—that had descended on the postwar capitalist… show more.