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1. Introduction
The Oxford Advance Learners Dictionary defines war as a situation in which two or
more countries or groups of people fight against each other over a period of time.
According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy war should be understood as
an actual, intentional and widespread armed conflict between political communities.
Thus, fisticuffs between individual persons do not count as a war, nor does a gang
fight. War is a phenomenon which occurs only between political communities, defined
as those entities which either are states or intend to become states (in order to allow
for civil war). But do these few lines constitute a satisfactory explanation for such a
complex phenomenon as that of war? Needles to say, the answer is no. Being one of
the most controversial and difficult to approach issues of modern life, war and its
mechanics are not an easy subject to explore. That is exactly why Heller's Catch-22
turns out to be so appealing: throughout its pages readers will be confronted with an
articulate and all-comprehensive representation of how the logic (or should one say
illogicalness?) of armed conflicts works. Published in 1961, this masterly written novel
avails itself of both tragedy and comedy in order to bring to light the insanity of war. It
was precisely the clarity with which it portrays the cruel nature of war, enhanced by its
bizarre and memorable characters and its black humor, which have triggered the
drawing up of this work, which aims to analyze how the madness of war is exposed in
this twentieth century masterpiece. Before proceeding to describe a number of its
characters and to comment on some passages of the book, a brief biography of the
author, a concise depiction of life in the United States after the Second World War,
and an account of how this work relates to the antiwar movement will be included, as
it is believed this will be of great help to get a better understanding of the whole novel
and a complete panorama of its precipitating factors and its later impact. Finally, a
conclusion will be added, where the final implications of the analysis will be stated.

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2. Biography of the author
Joseph Heller was born on May 1, 1923 amidst the seashore attractions and
famous hot-dog stands of New York's Coney Island. Fatherless, he grew up with his
Russian-immigrant mother and two older half-siblings. An occasional prankster, young
Joseph's mother often griped that he had a "twisted brain." Heller would use this
fanciful imagination in numerous short stories, novels, and plays, with Catch-22 and
Something Happened among his most famous compositions.
Heller enlisted in the United States Air Force in 1942 at the age of nineteen. His
experiences as a B-25 wing bombardier during World War II could have provided the
inspiration for Catch-22. In 1944, Heller completed his tour of duty, then defined at
sixty missions, and waited eagerly to be transported back to the United States.
Back in the United States, he married Shirley Held in 1945 and moved to California.
The G.I. bill
1
made it possible for Heller to attend the University of Southern California
where he pursued his dream of becoming a writer. He fathered two children, divorced,
and married a second woman named Valerie Humphries. Though dabbling in
advertising and teaching, Heller was passionate about writing all of his life. He died in
New York in 1999, suffering a heart attack at the age of seventy-six.
The huge and enduring success of Catch-22 established Joseph Heller as a major
author in contemporary American literature. As critic Louis Hasley wrote in his 1974
review, "Dramatic Tension in 'Catch-22'": "[The] alternating play of humor and horror
[in Catch-22] creates a dramatic tension throughout that allows the book to be labeled
as a classic both of humor and of war... The laughter repeatedly breaks through the
tight net of frustration in which the characters struggle only to sink back as the net
repairs itself and holds the reader prisoner in its outrageous
bonds."(http://www.bookrags.com/notes/c22/BIO.html)

3. Historical context
3.1. Life in the United States after World War II
As it was narrated in the radio program The Making of a Nation broadcasted by The
Voice of America on 28
th
December 2006, World War Two ended finally in the
summer of nineteen forty-five. Life in the United States began to return to normal.
Soldiers began to come home and find peacetime jobs. Industry stopped producing
war equipment and began to produce goods that made peacetime life pleasant. The
American economy was stronger than ever.

1
The G.I. Bill (officially titled Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, P.L. 78-346, 58 Stat. 284m)
was an bill that provided college or vocational education for returning World War II veterans (commonly
referred to as G.I.s) as well as one year of unemployment compensation. It also provided many different
types of loans for returning veterans to buy homes and start businesses.
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It is widely known that the World Wars, especially World War II, accelerated the
pace of technological developments in the field of weaponry, but that is only one part
of the story, it also did so in the fields of medicine, transportation, and entertainment,
among others. The average person experienced the triumphs of science most
dramatically in medicine and public health. Nothing in previous medical discovery
could equal the positive contributions of sulfa drugs, penicillin, cortisone, and
antibiotics. Apart from the advances in medical science, citizens in an industrial
society benefited from modern technology in ways too familiar to need recounting. For
entertainment, radio and the motion picture were available and, after the Second
World War, television. After 1947 airplanes could fly faster than the speed of sound;
giant airships could traverse huge distances in a few hours; tourist travel to distant
parts of the earth became commonplace. A new world of computers, rocketry, and
space technology also opened, and the world seemed on the threshold of a new
industrial age based on the nuclear power. (Palmer & Colton, A History of Modern
World, 1983)
Jud Sage (online in http://www.academicamerican.com/postww2/index.html) states
that in such a full of promise postwar world, the American people were looking forward
for better ways of life, and they were successful in attaining many improvements: most
of them were earning enough money to make some progress in their living conditions,
millions moved out of the cities and bought houses on the suburbs and, thanks to the
improvement in medical care, all of them enjoined an increase in life expectancy.

3.2. The Antiwar Movement in the United States
As Mark Barringer explains (http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/vietnam/antiwar.html)
along with the Civil Rights campaigns of the 1960s, this is one of the most divisive forces
in twentieth-century U.S. history. The antiwar movement actually consisted of a number of
independent interests, united only in opposition to the Vietnam War. Attracting members
from college campuses, middle-class suburbs, labor unions, and government institutions,
the movement gained national prominence in 1965, peaked in 1968, and remained
powerful throughout the duration of the conflict. Encompassing political, racial, and
cultural spheres, the antiwar movement exposed a deep schism within 1960s American
society.
By the beginning of 1965, the antiwar movement base, formed by students organizations
such as the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Free Speech Movement
(FSM), had coalesced on campuses and lacked only a catalyst to bring wider public
acceptance to its position. That catalyst appeared early in February, when the U.S. began
bombing North Vietnam. The pace of protest immediately quickened; its scope
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broadened. In March, SDS escalated the scale of dissent to a truly national level, calling
for a march on Washington to protest the bombing. On 17 April 1965, between 15,000 and
25,000 people gathered at the capital, a turnout that surprised even the organizers.
Buoyed by the attendance at the Washington march, movement leaders, still mainly
students, expanded their methods and gained new allies over the next two years.
Dissent escalated to violence. In April 1968 protesters occupied the administration
building at Columbia University; police used force to evict them. The brutal clashes
between police and peace activists at the August Democratic National Convention in
Chicago typified the divided nature of American society and foreshadowed a continuing
rise in domestic conflict.
The antiwar movement became both more powerful and, at the same time, less cohesive
between 1969 and 1973. Most Americans pragmatically opposed escalating the U.S. role
in Vietnam. At the same time, most disapproved of the counterculture that had arisen
alongside the antiwar movement. The clean-cut, well-dressed SDS members, were being
subordinated as movement leaders. Their replacements gained less public respect, were
tagged with the label "hippie," and faced much mainstream opposition from middle-class
Americans uncomfortable with the youth culture of the period-long hair, casual drug use,
promiscuity.
The movement regained solidarity following several disturbing incidents. In April 1970
President Nixon, who had previously committed to a planned withdrawal, announced that
U.S. forces had entered Cambodia. Within minutes of the televised statement, protesters
took to the streets with renewed focus. Then, on 4 May, Ohio National Guardsmen fired
on a group of student protesters at Kent State University, killing four and wounding
sixteen. When the New York Times published the first installment of the Pentagon Papers
on 13 June 1971, Americans became aware of the true nature of the war. Stories of drug
trafficking, political assassinations, and indiscriminate bombings led many to believe that
military and intelligence services had lost all accountability. Antiwar sentiment, previously
tainted with an air of anti-Americanism, became instead a normal reaction against zealous
excess. Dissent dominated America; the antiwar cause had become institutionalized. By
January 1973, when Nixon announced the effective end of U.S. involvement, he did so in
response to a mandate unequaled in modern times.

3.3. The antiwar movement and Cath-22
Although initially unpopular and receiving mixed reviews, Catch-22 quickly became
a symbol of the 1960s counter-culture, subverting and resisting systems of authority
responsible for the perpetuation of war. This novel served to inspire the antiwar
movement, galvanized by their opposition to the Vietnam War and the increasing
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spread and lethality of nuclear weapons. Stickers declaring "Yossarian Lives"
appeared among other slogans which supported this cause. Protestors challenged the
remorseless, cruel logic and sinister economic motives of the American military
machine as the real enemy, bitterly dividing the United States and resulting in
tragedies such as the massacre of innocent students. Hellers dark satire, with its
enigmatic, antiheroic protagonist, Yossarian, brilliantly exposes the institutionalized
madness of war.
(http://hsc.csu.edu.au/english/extension1/texts/elect1/4072/afterthebomb.htm#catch22)
Moreover, it is not only the exposure of the stupidity of war which relates this novel
to the antiwar movement, Heller also manages to depict the ridiculous bureaucracy
that rules the military system and forces soldiers into battle under any circumstance.
Neither sane nor mad men can escape the horrors of such a violent and impersonal
society as the one magnifically portrayed in Cath-22, and it is exactly the destructive
power of such a mechanized society what triggers the reactionary answer of the
antiwar movement.

4. Analysis of the Literary Work
Having finished with the description of the ideological and historical context which
lies behind the production and the later public acceptance of Catch-22, this work will
continue by providing some brief descriptions of some characters of the novel (only
those necessary to understand the book excerpts will be included). After that, a few
passages of the novel will be quoted and commented upon. In these excerpts, as it
was previously stated, Heller denounces the horrors and the insanity of war.

4.1. Characters Description

Yossarian: The main character of the novel. He is a paranoid bombardier who
thinks everyone is trying to kill him. He avoids flying combat missions by all means
possible: by moving the bomb line on the map of Italy preceding the Bologna mission,
by poisoning the squadron's potatoes, by dismantling his intercom and ordering his
plane to turn back, and by feigning a liver condition to pass the time safely in the
hospital. One of his friend's gory death traumatizes Yossarian and he refuses to wear
his uniform, preferring instead to go naked. He asks to be grounded on the basis of
insanity and rebelliously refuses to fly more missions. Because his disobedience
harms army morale, the Colonels in charge offer him a deal: if Yossarian will praise
his commanding officers, he will be sent home. Yossarian eventually rejects the
detestable bargain and runs away.
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Colonel Cathcart : A conceited and dejected colonel who constantly tries to garner
attention and desperately wants to be a general. Cathcart is the main antagonist of
the novel because he volunteers his men for dangerous assignments and constantly
raises the number of missions in a tour of duty to break records. He is obsessed with
getting his picture in The Saturday Evening Post.
Doc Daneeka: The bitter flight surgeon who resentfully avoids his duties in the
medical tent. He is bitter that the war took him away from a newly lucrative medical
practice back in the states. Yossarian asks the doctor to ground him on the basis of
insanity. Doc Daneeka explains that it is impossible and is the first to introduce
Yossarian to Catch-22. Daneeka is afraid to fly. He asks McWatt (a pilot) to record his
name on the pilot's flight log so he can draw flight pay without actually going up in a
plane. He is presumed dead when McWatt crashes. Irrationally, nobody heeds his
claim that he is still alive and his wife is sent a generic death notice.
Clevinger: An ingenious Harvard graduate who is the first to call Yossarian crazy.
He is picked on in cadet training by Lieutenant Scheisskopf, who brings him up on
contrived charges before the Action Board. Clevinger is presumed dead when his
plane disappears. (online in http://www.bookrags.com/notes/c22/CHR.html)

4.2. Relevant Passages of the Novel

Passage 1:
In Chapter 1: The Texan, a stove exploded in the hospital, causing a fire but even
though the firemen started to fight it, all of a sudden they had to leave for the field
where a group of planes was about to land. In this case the absurdity lies in the fact of
leaving aside a real dangerous situation so as to pay attention to a potential one,
which finally never occurs.
In about fifteen minutes the crash trucks from the airfield arrived to fight the
fire. For a frantic half hour it was touch and go. Then the firemen began to get the
upper hand. Suddenly there was the monotonous old drone of bombers returning
from a mission, and the firemen had to roll up their hoses and speed back to the
field in case one of the planes crashed and caught fire. The planes landed safely.
As soon as the last one was down, the firemen wheeled their trucks around and
raced back up the hill to resume their fight with the fire at the hospital. When they
got there, the blaze was out. It had died of its own accord, expired completely
without even an ember to be watered down, and there was nothing for the
disappointed firemen to do but drink tepid coffee and hang around trying to screw
the nurses.

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Passage 2
In Chapter 5: Chief White Halfoat, Yossarian asks Doc. Daneeka to ground him on
the basis of insanity, given that all the other men think he is nuts, but this is when the
doctor introduces him to the raving "Catch-22", and Yossarian learns that he has no
refuge from the illogicalness power of the rule:
There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a
concern for one's own 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.
Passage 3:
In Chapter 6: Hungry Joe Yossarian learns that the Twenty-seventh Air Force
Headquarters defines a complete tour as forty missions, and having forty-eight, he is
hopeful of discharge. That's why he approaches Wintergreen, whom he thought would
be concerned about him and provide him with some kind of solution, but the
conversation turns out to end in this way:
'What would they do to me,' he asked in confidential tones, 'if I refused to fly
them [more missions]?'
'We'd probably shoot you,' ex-P.F.C2. Wintergreen replied.
'We?' Yossarian cried in surprise. 'What do you mean, we? Since when are you
on their side?'
'If you're going to be shot, whose side do you expect me to be on?' ex-P.F.C.
Wintergreen retorted.
This last line illustrates the terrific logic which rules military life: you have to stay
always at the side of those in power, no matters how many lives or horrors it costs.
Passage 4:
In Chapter 8: Lieutenant Scheisskopf, the Action Board presents charges on
Clevinger after he stumbled while marching to class, many excerpts revealing the
corruption of the system can be found in the interrogatory which he underwent. The
following are just a few of them, which shows it did not matter at all whether Clevinger
was guilty or not, given that The case against Clevinger was open and shut. The only
thing missing was something to charge him with:

2
Private First Class (PFC) is a military rank held by junior enlisted persons.
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The colonel sat down and settled back, calm and cagey suddenly, and
ingratiatingly polite.
'What did you mean,' he inquired slowly, 'when you said we couldn't punish
you?'
'When, sir?'
'I'm asking the questions. You're answering them.'
'Yes, sir. I -'
'Did you think we brought you here to ask questions and for me to answer
them?'
'No, sir. I -'
'What did we bring you here for?'
'To answer questions.'
'I didn't say you couldn't punish me, sir.'
'When?' asked the colonel.
'When what, sir?'
'Now you're asking me questions again.'
'I'm sorry, sir. I'm afraid I don't understand your question.'
'When didn't you say we couldn't punish you? Don't you understand my
question?'
'No, sir. I don't understand.'
'You've just told us that. Now suppose you answer my question.'
'But how can I answer it?'
'That's another question you're asking me.'
'I'm sorry, sir. But I don't know how to answer it.
I never said you couldn't punish me.'
'Now you're telling us when you did say it.
I'm asking you to tell us when you didn't say it.'
Passage 5:
In Chapter 29: Peckem, the latest mission is presented to the soldiers, it consists on
bombarding a tiny, undefended village. Colonel Catchcart states that the mission is
entirely unnecessary. Its only purpose is to delay German reinforcements at a time
when we aren't even planning an offensive. But that's the way things go when you
elevate mediocre people to positions of authority. The soldiers reject the mission as
they are told that the people in the village hadn't even been warned, but the colonels
threaten them with another dangerous mission to Bologna. As one can note in this
extract, logic is astonishingly missing within the military system, allowing countless
individual's lives to be crushed by the most selfish and unscrupulous interests.

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5. Conclusion
After finishing the reading of Catch-22 and the drawing up of this brief
monographic analysis based on it, one can state that Heller's witty novel
manages to bring home to the reader the intricacy that lies behind one of the
most difficult to grasp phenomenons of the modern world, the phenomenon of
armed conflicts. The great achievement of the novel is its magnificent depiction
of the illogical nature of war in all its horror: doctors save lives in order to put
them in danger again, colonels orchestrate unnecessary missions with the only
objective of getting good pictures of them and, in that way, appearing in the
newspapers, and fighters feel their superiors hate them even more than the
enemy. The best image of this absurd world in which military life develops, is
the one provided by the author himself: He [Yossarian] woke up blinking with a
slight pain in his head and opened his eyes upon a world boiling in chaos in
which everything was in proper order.
Like all great literary works, Catch-22 has an incredible impact on the reader,
it has the power of getting him to question the principles which are at the helm
of the military system and to rebel against their madness. Astoundingly original
and unavoidably tough, it also makes use of the element of surprise all along its
lines: none of the outrageous events told throughout its pages can pass
unnoticed, its unique characters are absolutely memorable, and its brilliant
interchange of comedy and tragedy capture one's attentions just from the first
chapter.
The core of the issue lies in the fact that it is not Yossarian's insanity what
Heller illustrates in his novel but rather the world's madness, more specifically,
that which dominates warfare. And undoubtedly, as one discovers that the
protagonist is perfectly sane, it is the thread of such a gloomy and insane reality
what becomes the main worry. As Rose Sallberg Kam points out Catch-22
does not come full circle but rises to another plane; we are wiser about our zany
and tragic world, and certainly sorrier. (online at
http://preterhuman.net/texts/thought_and_writing/book_notes/Catch-22)