Context
Joseph Heller was born in
Brooklyn in 1923. He served as an Air Force
bombardier in World War II and enjoyed a
long career as a writer and a teacher. His best-selling books include Something
Happened, Good as Gold, Picture
This, God Knows, and Closing Time, but
his first novel, Catch-22, remains
his most famous and acclaimed work. He died of a heart attack in
December 1999.
Heller wrote Catch-22 while
working at a New York City marketing firm producing ad copy. The
novel draws heavily on his Air Force experience and presents a war
story that is at once hilarious, grotesque, cynical, and stirring.
The novel generated a great deal of controversy upon its initial
publication in 1961. Critics tended either
to adore it or despise it, and those who hated it did so for the same
reasons as the critics who loved it. Over time, Catch-22 has become
one of the defining novels of the twentieth century. It presents
an utterly unsentimental vision of war, stripping all romantic pretenses
away from combat, replacing visions of glory and honor with a kind
of nightmarish comedy of violence, bureaucracy, and paradoxical
madness. This kind of irony has come to be expected of war novels
since the Vietnam War, but in the wake of World War II, which
most Americans believed was a just and heroic war, Catch-22 was
shocking. It proved almost prophetic about both the Vietnam War,
a conflict that began a few years after the novel was originally published,
and the sense of disillusionment about the military that many Americans
experienced during this conflict.
Unlike other antiromantic war novels, such as Erich Maria Remarque's All
Quiet on the Western Front, Catch-22 relies
heavily on humor to convey the insanity of war, presenting the horrible meaninglessness
of armed conflict through a kind of desperate absurdity rather than
through graphic depictions of suffering and violence. Catch-22 also
distinguishes itself from other antiromantic war novels through
its core values: the story of Yossarian, the protagonist, is ultimately
not one of despair but one of hope. He believes that the positive
urge to live and to be free can redeem the individual from the dehumanizing
machinery of war. The novel is told as a series of loosely related,
tangential stories in no particular chronological order. The narrative
that emerges from this structural tangle upholds the value of the
individual in the face of the impersonal, collective military mass;
at every stage it mocks insincerity and hypocrisy, even when such
values appear triumphant.
Despite its World War II setting, Catch-22 is
often thought of as a -signature novel of the 1960s
and 1970s. It was during those decades that
American youth truly began to question authority. Hippies, university
protests, and the civil rights movement all marked the 1960s
as a decade of revolution, and Heller's novel fit in perfectly with
the spirit of the times. In fact, Heller once said, “I wasn't interested
in the war in Catch-22. I
was interested in the personal relationships in bureaucratic authority.”
Whether Heller was using the war to comment on authority or using
bureaucracy as a statement about the war, it is clear that Catch-22 is
more than just a war novel. It is also a novel about the moral choices
that every person must make when faced with a system of authority
whose rules are both immoral and illogical.
