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Joseph Heller: At War with Absurdity
Critic: Jean E. Kennard
Source: MOSAIC IV/3, Spring, 1971, pp. 75–87. Reproduced by permission
Criticism about: Joseph Heller (1923-)
Nationality: American
Heller's vision of the horrifying absurdity of service life in World War II is, as the constant references in
[Catch-22] to its wider implications indicate, merely an illustration of the absurdity of the human condition
itself. Catch-22 reflects a view of the world which is basically that of Jean-Paul Sartre and the early Albert
Camus. The world has no meaning but is simply there; man is a creature who seeks meaning. The
relationship between man and his world is therefore absurd; human action having no intrinsic value is
ultimately futile ; human beings have no innate characteristics. Reason and language, man's tools for
discovering the meaning of his existence and describing his world, are useless. When a man discovers
these facts about his condition he has an experience of the absurd, an experience which Sartre calls
nausea. But there are innumerable contemporary novels which are fundamentally Existentialist. What is
interesting about Catch-22 is that the experimental techniques Heller employs have a direct relation to
Existentialist ideas; they are an attempt to dramatize his view of the human condition rather than merely
describe it. (pp. 756)
The question of authority is central to the novel. God certainly no longer runs the organization, though He
lingers on in certain distorted images some characters still have of Him. (p. 76)
Duty is now owed to such vague abstractions as patriotism and free enterprise, which have become
exactly the tyrannous absolute values that Camus talks of in L'Homme révolté. The old man in the brothel
in Rome exposes patriotism as illogical: Surely so many countries can't all be worth dying for....
Capitalism and free enterprise lead Milo to bomb his own unit and he excuses his action with the old
slogan that what is good for money-making interests is good for the country. Incentive and private
industry are goods and their evil results cannot change anyone's attitude towards them.
Such assertive values as patriotism, then, are merely words, words which have become divorced from
meaning. Heller's awareness of the separation of word and idea, which Sartre talks of, is apparent in
several places in the novel. General Peckem who laid great, fastidious stress on small matters of taste and
style ... has lost all sense of what words mean and writes his directives in a manner which combines
impeccable grammar and trite adjectives. Language no longer communicates but serves to confuse things
further. When Yossarian makes a game of censoring letters, declaring one day death to all modifiers, the
next declaring a war on articles and finally blacking out everything except a, an, and the, he finds
that it creates more dramatic interlinear tensions ... and in just about every case ... a message far more
universal.... (pp. 767)
Catch-22 is, of course, Heller's illustration of the irrational nature of the world. Any attempt to argue
logically and reasonably ends in a paradox; one reaches that point where thought reaches its confines,
which Camus talks of....
Catch-22 is composed of rules which apparently operate to make it impossible for a man to find a
reasonable escape from them. They do not exactly contradict each other, but are continually inadequate to
the occasion and always disregard the individual human life. They are intended to impose order upon
chaos, but life so exceeds these rules that they only serve in the end to create more chaos. One of the
clearest examples of this is the firemen who leave the blaze they are attempting to control at the hospital in
order to obey the rule that they must always be on the field when the planes land. ...
Since the rules do not work, anything may happen. There is no reasonable justice. (p. 77)
In a world where philosophical ideas, traditional morality and reason itself are apparently useless, all man
has to hold on to is his own physical body. The value which Heller supports throughout the novel is that of
human existence, the individual human life.... There is no talk of love or even of close friendship in the
book; the pleasures of life are purely physicalfood, liquor, sexjust as the only real horror is physical
pain and ultimately death. In an absurd universe, writes Frederick Karl, the individual has the right to
seek survival ; ... one's own substance is infinitely more precious than any cause [see CLC, Vol. 1].
The view of the world in Catch-22, then, is the same view as that presented by Sartre and Camus, and the
aware individual in this world comes to very much the same realizations about it as do Roquentin and
Mathieu in Sartre's novels. He realizes that there is no ultimate reason for doing one thing rather than
another.... (p. 78)
The aware individual realizes, too, that there is no way of really knowing anything. ... [We] learn that
there are always two widely divergent official reports for every event that takes place.
When everything is questionable, it is a small step to questioning one's own identity.... Names, uniforms,
marks of identification are all a man has in Heller's world to assure him of his own identity.
Yossarian and the chaplain, probably the two most aware characters in the novel, both have experiences
of the absurd very similar to those of Roquentin in Sartre's La Nausée. The chaplain experiences
terrifying, sudden moments when objects, concepts and even people that the chaplain had lived with all
his life inexplicably took on an unfamiliar and irregular aspect that he had never seen before and made them
seem totally strange. ... Yossarian's experiences also have the effect of alienating him from his
environment, but are less concerned with the strangeness of objects than with their profusion and
gratuitousness. (pp. 789)
Heller, like Sartre and Camus, is not however totally pessimistic. Valid action is possible for the individual;
there is even the suggestion of a sane universe which Sweden may represent. The hope of Sweden is
perhaps a false note in the novel, but it is important to remember that it is only a possibility, a state of mind
rather than a real place. Although Orr has, at least reportedly, reached Sweden, ironically by pretending to
be crazy, Yossarian at the end of the novel does not really expect to get further than Rome.
In a discussion of the techniques which Heller has employed to convey his view of the world it would be
easy to ignore the obvious. Catch-22 is a very funny book. It would be easy to ignore this because, in
spite of the laughter it evokes, the overall impression is as much of horror as of humor. The laughter
evoked is not of the kind that unites us warmly in sympathy with the human race as we enjoy its foibles, but
rather that which serves to alienate us by exposing the bitter ironies of existence. Nevertheless I believe
that humor is a way of understanding the techniques of the novel. Laughter, as Bergson suggests, is caused
by incongruity, by a frustrating of our expectations of a certain result, and it is a failure to fulfill certain of
the reader's expectations which is the link underlying the so-called absurd techniques of the novel. (p. 79)
[When] the reader is confronted with the juxtaposition in one sentence of references to several unrelated
events about which he so far knows nothing, we cannot say that it is not like life. Actually it is; we often
overhear conversations which are meaningless to us because we do not understand to whom or to what
they refer. Yet we are surprised to find it in a novel. In this instance, obviously, it is our expectations about
the nature of the novel, not about life, which are not being fulfilled. This is, I think, the key to defining the
absurd techniques. In some way each of them plays against and frustrates the reader's expectations of a
novel, the illusions, one could say, that he has about the nature of the novel. ...
It is obvious that the narrative technique of Catch-22 does not fulfill the expectation of the reader for a
continuous line of action in which one episode is related to the next, at the very least chronologically, and in
which events are life-size and probable. Situations which are initially familiar enough to the reader may be
gradually exaggerated to the point of absurdity. (p. 80)
The futility of all human action is suggested by Heller in the number of times events or conversations are
repeated so that the reader, like Yossarian, eventually has the feeling that he has been through this exact
conversation before....
The narrative technique serves to confuse the reader about time and to destroy any certainty he may have
about what has taken place, thus creating in him the same doubts about reality that Yossarian experiences
and that Sartre and Camus speak of. Heller employs three basic methods of disrupting the expected
chronological flow of the action. The first is a simple one. He often makes a statement about an event
which has taken place and deliberately omits the clarification which the statement requires. Therefore many
of the major events in the novel are referred to two or three times, sometimes in increasing detail, before
the full account is given....
The second device creates confusion in the mind of the reader by presenting him with two apparently
contradictory statements about the same event before providing a clarification. (p. 81)
The third method is an extension of the second: contradictory accounts are given of an event and no
solution is provided. The reader is left uncertain of the truth and in some instances asked to believe the
incredible. ...
As well as confusing the reader about the time or exact nature of the events in the novel, Heller also
frequently shocks him by adopting attitudes to objects or situations opposite to the expected ones. By
introducing these unexpected attitudes in a very casual way, he not only challenges the traditional value
system but suggests through his tone that nothing unusual is being said, thus doubling the shock effect....
Heller's methods of characterization, like his narrative techniques and his use of tone, depend upon a
frustration of the reader's expectations. (p. 82)
There are two possible ways ... of failing to fulfill a reader's expectations about character in a novel: one is
to change the character's identity, provide multiple personalities for the same name, or one name for
various figures, and thus disturb the reader's whole conception of identity, as do John Barth and Samuel
Beckett; the other is to provide caricatures, figures who are no more than puppets and in whom the reader
is not expected to believe. Heller occasionally appears to experiment with the first method, as, for
example, in the scene where Yossarian pretends to be a dying officer whose parents fail to recognize him,
or where Yossarian and Dunbar discover they can change identities by changing hospital beds. But
although in these scenes the characters experience doubts about their identities, the reader is always quite
clear about the identity of the character and no real confusion is created.
Most of the characters in Catch-22 are, however, caricatures, cardboard figures who are distinguished for
the reader by their particular obsessions. Each lives with an illusory view of the world which isolates him
and makes the results of his actions very different from his expectations. Each is, in his way, the unaware
individual who, as Camus illustrates in Le Mythe de Sisyphe, believes that he can operate in the world as
he imagines it and that his actions will achieve their purpose. (p. 83)
Most of these characters are introduced to us in deceptively explanatory paragraphs which appear to sum
up their personalities in a few adjectives, but which really provide the reader with irreconcilably opposite
traits.... Gradually the characters become increasingly absurd as the personality traits of each are seen to
be one, an obsession. It is believable that one of Milo's moral principles was that it was never a sin to
charge as much as the traffic could bear, ... but by the time his activities have taken over Europe and
North Africa in one vast syndicate and he has bombed his own men, he has become little more than a
personification of greed. Scheisskopf's enjoyment of parades may be initially credible but his childish
delight in calling off parades that have never been scheduled is not. These characters may have names,
parents, heredity, professions and faces, but we cannot very long sustain the illusion that they are real
human beings.
The most important device a novelist has to suggest an irrational world is, of course, the treatment of
reason itself. Reasoning, in Catch-22, invariably ends up in some variation of Catch-22; apparent logic is
used to destroy sense. The reader is led into following an argument which progresses logically, but which
arrives at an absurd conclusion. (pp. 834)
Sentence structure is used throughout Catch-22 to add to the reader's confusion about characters and
events and contributes to the impression of an irrational world. The novel is full of complex sentences in
which the individual clauses and phrases are not related to each other or are related at a tangent.... (p. 84)
Frederick Karl describes Yossarian as the man who acts in good faith to use Sartre's often-repeated
phrase, and claims that all Yossarian can hope to know is that he is superior to any universal force
(man-made or otherwise), and all he can hope to recognize is that the universal or collective force can
never comprehend the individual. He goes on to call Yossarian's final decision a moral act of
responsibility, reflective, conscious and indeed free, while the other characters are not free, he
considers, because they are unaware. This is all true; it is obvious that Yossarian is a man of whom Sartre
would approve, but it does not go far enough. Certainly awareness is a prerequisite to the right action as
Heller sees it. it is proved useless to be simply good like the chaplain or merely innocent like Nately,
unable to detach himself from his father's values. And certainly Yossarian acts in freedom, but in the name
of what? I do not think that it is only in the name of his own individual life, although this is his starting point.
What most critics have overlooked is that Yossarian changes, is the one character who learns from his
experience in the novel.
At the beginning of Catch-22 Yossarian attempts to exercise his reason to escape from the situation he is
in. Everywhere he looked was a nut, and it was all a sensible young gentleman like himself could do to
maintain his perspective against so much madness. ... He soon learns, however, that everyone considers
everyone else a nut and that when he attempts to argue logically against flying more missions he comes
up against Catch-22. He realizes that to use reason in the face of the irrational is futile and that the way out
of Catch-22 is simply to rebel, in Camus' sense, to take a stand, to say no. He refuses to fly any more
missions. This is, of course, the way the problems of Catch-22 have been solved earlier in the novel: the
young officers solve the problem of the dead man in Yossarian's tent simply by throwing out his
possessions; Major de Coverley solves the great loyalty oath Catch, which is preventing the men from
getting their meals, simply by saying `Give everybody eat'....
Until the final episode in the book, Yossarian is the great supporter of individual right.... That men would
die was a matter of necessity; which men would die, though, was a matter of circumstance and Yossarian
was willing to be a victim of anything but circumstance. ... Yossarian indeed realizes, as Karl suggests,
that one must not be asked to give his life unless everybody is willing to give his, but by the end of the
novel he has come to realize the logical extension of this concept, that, if what is true for one must be
applied to all, then one cannot attempt to save one's own life at the expense of others. One cannot give
tacit acceptance to other people's deaths, without giving everyone the same right over oneself. (pp. 856)
Yossarian is given the chance to save his own life if he lies about Colonels Cathcart and Korn to their
superior officers. He will, in accepting the offer, probably act as an incentive to his fellow officers to fly
more missions in which many of them may be killed. He is given a chance, in Camus' terms, to join forces
with the pestilences. After accepting the offer he is stabbed by Nately's whore and realizes perhaps that by
joining those who are willing to kill, he has given everyone the right to kill him. If one rebels, one must rebel
in the name of a value which transcends oneself, human life is the value for which Yossarian rebels and runs
off to Rome, but it is not merely his own individual existence. (p. 86)
If we look back at the novel in the light of what Yossarian's decision reveals, we can see that Heller has
presented us with a series of character studies of selfish men and has shown how their actions for their own
gain have involved death for others. They are all like Major Major's father, a long-limbed farmer, a
God-fearing, freedom-loving, rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was
creeping socialism. ... Milo, another rugged individualist, bombs his own men; Colonel Cathcart, aiming
at impressing the Generals to obtain promotion, keeps raising the number of missions his men must fly. To
claim as Karl does, that these characters are not really evil in any sinister way but just men on the make
is inaccurate. The man on the make is evil to Heller, since he gains at the expense of others and asks
them to do what he is not willing to do himself.
The last ten pages or so of the novel may be sentimentally handled, as critics have suggested, but they
present the key to a full understanding of what Heller is saying. In an irrational and gratuitous world the
aware individual has to rebel, but his rebellion must be a free act and in the name of a value which can be
applied to all men and does not limit their freedom.
The style of Catch-22, like the narrative technique, the tone and the methods of characterization, serves to
frustrate the reader's expectations.... The reader expects to be drawn into the world of a novel, then, but
Catch-22, while initially providing him with familiar human situations, ends by rejecting him. The novel itself
becomes an object which provides the reader with the experience of the absurd, just as the trees provide it
for Roquentin in Sartre's La Nausée. After attempting to relate his preconceptions about novels, his
illusions about the form, to this novel, the reader is finally stripped of them. Catch-22 simultaneously
shows man's illusory view of the world, employs techniques to suggest the irrational nature of the world
and is itself an object against which the truth of its statements may be tested. (pp. 867)
Source: Jean E. Kennard, Joseph Heller: At War with Absurdity, in MOSAIC IV/3, Spring, 1971, pp.
7587. Reproduced by permission.
Source Database: Contemporary Literary Criticism