In this blog, I will be discussing the novel "Catch 22" written by Joseph Heller.
Blog 1
To read a book one must first understand where the author is coming from, otherwise a person’s understanding of the book will be diluted by personal biases and previous life experiences. Now I’m not saying that a person cannot interpret something their own way, rather that a person should understand the viewpoint of the creator first, before interpreting it himself. So who was this Joseph Heller? Well he was a writer, veteran and an anti-war activist, the first few pages of the book go into his life. Growing up in New York City to poor Jewish parents, having to struggle for money and serving in WW2. After the war Joseph saw a fundamental flaw in the world. This flaw would end up with him writing a whole book satirizing the world and it’s leaders. That book was Catch 22, which I will be exploring in this blog, further down the line. It ended up being a critical success in his career, yet it also ended up killing his growth as no other book he ever published went on to reach such heights. So the book was written by a war veteran who had seen the largest conflict in human history first hand and was not in favour of it. Yet the book doesn’t satirize only World War 2, even though it takes place during it. Many have speculated that due to the use of technology that did not exist during WW2 yet is present in the book. That the book actually satirizes the Korean war. This would make sense since it was going on at the time of writing and Heller being against such conflicts would have had no problem poking fun at another one. So to Recap the book takes place in Italy and around the Mediterranean Sea during WW2, but is also partially influenced by the Korean war. And the book itself is written from the point of view of a man who served during World War 2 in part due to it being a way out of the poverty he was born into.
Blog 2
The book starts out with our protagonist Yossarian in the hospital. Now Yossarian is no gunslinging, nazi killing, cold blooded American badass. He’s more of an anti hero, someone who isn’t seeking out heroic deeds and more often than not can be found acting for his own benefit. Yet this is what makes him and other anti heroes so relatable. They are selfish and to some degree self centered, but not without heart and self awareness. They act not like how we wish we would, but how we actually do. For example at the start of the book Yossarian is found faking illness to get out of service. Now most have fantasized about landing on the beaches of Normandy and single handedly liberating Europe and killing Hitler. Yet this is only a fantasy because it would take an enormous amount of luck and more importantly bravery to accomplish, which is why most regular civilians upon being placed in a military environment would try to avoid service, I mean even trained, combat ready soldiers fear battle after facing it once or twice. So spending time in the hospital trying to avoid risking your life for honour, while definitely not very prideful is definitely realistic. But our protagonist gets out of the hospital upon hearing of the Texan’s arrival. See the citizens of Texas tend to be a tad bit prideful about their state and there is a military code of sort in the book that service with a texan must suck due to their overbearing, never ending patriotism about their state. Upon getting out Yossarian hears from his commander that the minimum requirement of missions to retire has gone up from forty five to seventy five. Up to that point Yossarian had done forty four. This ofcourse leaves him with a sour taste in his mouth as he was already not looking forward to coming back to service and now has to risk his life an additional thirty times. Now this is where I will end the blog for today, next time I’ll be taking a deep dive into the Catch 22 itself.
Blog 3
What is a Catch 22? Well in the book a Catch 22 is a bureaucratic restriction on soldiers, which prevents them from asking for psychological evaluations in hopes to be declared insane and be sent home. It follows the line of reasoning that only an insane person would ever wish to willingly go into war, so wanting to get out is a sign of sanity.This basically makes the existence of a law that lets soldiers get out if they are insane pointless, as if a soldier asks to be let out he will just get the same answer of “No”. So why does this law exist? Well it exists as a way for the government to keep the army in balance. Because if every soldier just starts coming home whenever they like it the army will crumble, yet the army also has to be humane enough for the soldier not to riot. So the law serves as a way of keeping everything in control and the soldiers fighting. Yet these twisted up bureaucratic restrictions don't only exist in the book, here let me give another example. Let's say there is a country and its leader is paranoid, paranoid that everyone is out to get him. So he assembles a secret police squad to go out and kill everyone he dislikes. But before anyone can kill these people they must make them confess to a crime worthy of the death penalty. So these soldiers, knowing that they are there to kill these guys, just beat them until they confess to things they didn’t do. But why get the confessions? If either way everyone knows they don't mean anything. Well because it's a diplomatic failsafe, anyone who dares accuse the great leader of purgerry can look at these confessions and if they accuse the confessions of being fake, well how could they know, they must be a traitor themselves. But this would never happen in real life though? Well it did in the Soviet Union during the Great Purge, but it didn't only happen there, it happened anywhere where there was or is or will be any resemblance of power. As if there is power there will be people trying to contain it for themselves and a Catch 22 is just one way of doing that. The thing about a Catch 22 is that they are also usually very hard to get rid off. Everyone knows they are fake, but they are usually too much effort to be destroyed. If we look at Yossarian, he’s a pilot in WW2, no general, nor marshal. His word does not hold that much weight in the army, so he can’t dispute the law himself. Of course a higher ranking general could, but why would they want to? They are the ones benefiting from it and going through tons of effort just to get your troops home and safe, while a nice gesture, definitely not a logical war strategy. Same in the Soviet Union, how can a lonely citizen tell Stalin that these confessions are fake? Even if it seems offly uncharacteristic of die hard, loyal Bolsheviks to suddenly admit to a plot against the Union on a paper covered in their own blood. If someone dares to challenge these confessions they'll just meet the same end as the people who signed them. And that is the most important part of a Catch 22, it's not only designed to fail, it is also designed to be too hard to get rid off, due to fear of challenging the authority that set it in place.
Blog 5
In this book, Joseph Heller displays a clear sentiment of anti-war ideas, those ideas are presented in many different ways among all the characters. Yet, perhaps the most interesting one is the most common one. Let me explain, in the book almost every character is completely unable to comprehend the danger and terror of the war. Seemingly every time Yossarian brings up the fact that the war is dangerous and he does not want to seek out death on the battlefield, he gets disregarded like some blabbering idiot. Even people who should be on Yossarian's side, like his fellow squadron member Clevinger, would not listen to him. This idea of people misrepresenting war is supposed to show how society often tends to overly romanticize war and in turn promote it. Ask yourself how often have you seen a war film, song, play, or any other kind of media, that tends to make the protagonist an unrealistic, god-like hero that never abandons his moral values nor his mission? That's a pretty common phenomenon, at least in my eyes. But this portrait of a soldier as a hero is far from true. To start off with for a soldier to be a hero he must pursue something heroic, yet far too often soldiers only pursue the meaningless goals of those above them, and not only do they have to pursue these goals, but they also have to take the blame for them. Making the foreign soldier the enemy instead of the general commanding him, but this goes both ways and the foreign soldier looks at our soldiers in the same manner. The most ironic part is that the two soldiers most definitely have more in common than the men whose actions they are carrying out, yet they are willing to kill each other for those men. Now I'm not saying soldiers are saints, they themselves can oftentimes be just as cruel and merciless as the people commanding them. But I am saying that they do lack an amount of true reparation in popular media. Not in a movie that portrays an American marine single handily killing Hitler, Stalin, and every other genocidal dictator ever. But in a movie that shows a marine coming back from war with PTSD, a lost limb, or something that shows the true horrors of war and makes you never want to experience what those men did.
Blog 6
Today I will be exploring a passage from the book and its implications. This passage happens right after Clevinger, our protagonist's squadron mate is convicted of an infraction he did not commit, and upon that he realizes:
These three men who hated spoke his language and wore his uniform, but he saw their loveless faces set immutably into cramped, mean lines of hostility and understood instantly that nowhere in the world, not in all the fascist tanks or planes or submarines, not in the bunker behind the machine guns or mortars or behind the blowing flame throwers, not even among all the expert gunners of the crack Hermann Goering Antiaircraft Division or among the grisly connivers in all the beer halls in Munich and everywhere else, were there men who hated him more. (84)
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This signifies a redundancy of war that soldiers are far too familiar with. The idea of killing an"enemy" soldier who is in all likelihood more similar to you than your commander is, yet you are instructed to finish his life by some pompous, disconnected, aristocrat who probably didn't even have to earn his stripes. But not all commanders were arrogant or unaware some were good men, yet the fact that they were commanders still took a toll on their relationship with their troops. As since they were commanders they had to hold some sort of power, which they had to exercise daily in order to exact control over their troops. Resulting in even the good Generals and Marshalls not being friends of soldiers, merely their superiors. This meant that the idea of a fellow soldier stuck in the trenches of Stalingrad will always seem more sympathetic. So why do soldiers fight against their fellow man? Well, the answer to that is propaganda. Which is one of the many bureaucratic problems that Joseph Heller points out in the book. In World War 2 propaganda was mass made because the Nazis had not reached the level of synonymity with evil that they have today and thus reasons to fight them were needed. Yet after the Nazis got exposed there was no more reason for propaganda against them as their actions had done all the convincing. This is uncharacteristic of propaganda as usually, it lays its roots deep within society and doesn't let go for a long time, even after the conflict has ended. Propaganda isn't just some colorful poster saying go die for your country, it's the reason why Serbs hate Bosnians, why Korea is divided, and why Iraq was invaded. It's a tool for human greed it allows people to justify the slaughter of a fellow man, just because of his ethnicity. Yet seemingly a man of a different ethnicity might be more similar to a foreigner than to his own. For example, let's say you live near the border of Italy and France who are you more similar to, an Italian living in Northern Italy also close to the border or to a French man living in Normandy? Logically you'd probably say the Italian yet in a war aggregated by propaganda it would be uncommon to find the two French men shooting the Italian. And this is the problem that Joseph Heller sees, a man being manipulated by the government to kill what could be his friend with someone he is made to believe is his friend.