American Literature books summary

(Joseph Heller)

SOME INFO ON JOSEPH HELLER b. May 1, 1923, Brooklyn, N.Y., U.S.

American writer whose novel Catch-22 (1961) was one of the most significant works of protest literature to appear after World War II. The satirical novel was both a critical and a popular success, and a film version appeared in 1970.Heller flew 60 combat missions as a bombardier with the U.S. Air Force in Europe. He received an M.A. at Columbia
University in 1949 and was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Oxford
(1949-50). He taught English at Pennsylvania State University (1950-52) and worked as an advertising copywriter for the magazines Time (1952-56) and
Look (1956-58) and as promotion manager for McCall's (1958-61), meanwhile writing Catch-22 in his spare time. The plot of the novel centres on the antihero Captain John Yossarian, stationed at an airstrip on a
Mediterranean island in World War II, and portrays his desperate attempts to stay alive. The "catch" in Catch-22 involves a mysterious Air Force regulation, which asserts that a man is considered insane if he willingly continues to fly dangerous combat missions; but, if he makes the necessary formal request to be relieved of such missions, the very act of making the request proves that he is sane and therefore ineligible to be relieved. The term Catch-22 thereafter entered the English language as a reference to a proviso that trips one up no matter which way one turns.His later novels including Something Happened (1974), an unrelievedly pessimistic novel,
Good as Gold (1979), a satire on life in Washington, D.C., and God Knows
(1984), a wry, contemporary-vernacular monologue in the voice of the biblical King David, were less successful. Closing Time, a sequel to Catch-
22, appeared in 1994. Heller's dramatic work includes the play We Bombed in
New Haven (1968).

CONTEXT

Joseph Heller was born in Brooklyn in 1923. He served as an Air Force bombardier in World War II, and has enjoyed a long career as a writer and a teacher. His bestselling 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.

Written while Heller worked producing ad copy for a New York City marketing firm, Catch-22 draws heavily on Heller's Air Force experience, and presents a war story that is at once hilarious, grotesque, bitterly cynical, and utterly stirring. The novel generated a great deal of controversy upon its publication; critics tended either to adore it or despise it, and those who hated it did so for the same reason 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 pretense away from combat, replacing visions of glory and honor with a kind of nightmarish comedy of violence, bureaucracy, and paradoxical madness.

Unlike other anti-romantic war novels, such as 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 anti- romantic war novels by its core values: Yossarian's story is ultimately not one of despair, but one of hope; 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 disconnected series of loosely related, tangential stories in no particular chronological order; the final 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 they appear to be triumphant.

SUMMARY FOR "CATCH-22"

Chapters 1-5

Yossarian is in a military hospital in Italy with a liver condition that isn't quite jaundice. He is not really even sick, but he prefers the hospital to the war outside, so he pretends to have a pain in his liver.
The doctors are unable to prove him wrong, so they let him stay, perplexed at his failure to develop jaundice. Yossarian shares the hospital ward with his friend Dunbar; a bandaged, immobile man called the soldier in white; and a pair of nurses Yossarian suspect hate him. One day an affable Texan is brought into the ward, where he tries to convince the other patients that "decent folk" should get extra votes. The Texan is so nice that everyone hates him. A chaplain comes to see Yossarian, and although he confuses the chaplain badly during their conversation, Yossarian is filled with love for him. Less than ten days after the Texan is sent to the ward, everyone but the soldier in white flees the ward, recovering from their ailments and returning to active duty.

Outside the hospital there is a war going on, and millions of boys are bombing each other to death. No one seems to have a problem with this arrangement except Yossarian, who once argued with Clevinger, an officer in his group, about the war. Yossarian claimed that everyone was trying to kill him. Clevinger argued that no one was trying to kill Yossarian personally, but Yossarian has no patience for Clevinger's talk of countries and honor and insists that they are trying to kill him. After being released from the hospital, Yossarian sees his roommate Orr and notices that Clevinger is still missing. He remembers the last time he and
Clevinger called each other crazy, during a night at the officers' club when Yossarian announced to everyone present that he was superhuman because no one had managed to kill him yet. Yossarian is suspicious of everyone when he gets out of the hospital; he has a meal in Milo's mess hall, then talks to Doc Daneeka, who enrages Yossarian by telling him that Colonel
Cathcart has raised to fifty the number of missions required before a soldier can be discharged. The previous number was forty-five. Yossarian has flown forty missions.

Yossarian talks to Orr, who tells him an irritating story about how he liked to keep crab apples in his cheeks when he was younger. Yossarian briefly remembers the time a whore had beaten Orr over the head with her shoe in Rome outside Nately's whore's kid sister's room. Yossarian notices that Orr is even smaller than Huple, who lives near Hungry Joe's tent.
Hungry Joe has nightmares whenever he isn't scheduled to fly a mission the next day; his screaming keeps the whole camp awake. Hungry Joe's tent is near a road where the men sometimes pick up girls and take them out to the the tall grass near the open-air movie theater that a U.S.O. troupe visited that same afternoon. The troupe was sent by an ambitious general named P.P.
Peckem, who hopes to take over the command of Yossarian's wing from General
Dreedle. General Peckem's troubleshooter Colonel Cargill, who used to be a spectacular failure as a marketing executive and who is now a spectacular failure as a colonel. Yossarian feels sick, but Doc Daneeka still refuses to ground him. Doc Daneeka advises Yossarian to be like Havermeyer and make the best of it; Havermeyer is a fearless lead bombardier. Yossarian thinks that he himself is a lead bombardier filled with a very healthy fear.
Havermeyer likes to shoot mice in the middle of the night; once, he woke
Hungry Joe and caused him to dive into one of the slit trenchs that have appeared nightly beside every tent since Milo Minderbinder, the mess officer, bombed the squadron.

Hungry Joe is crazy, and though Yossarian tries to help him, Hungry Joe won't listen to his advice because he thinks Yossarian is crazy. Doc
Daneeka doesn't believe Hungry Joe has problems--he thinks only he has problems, because his lucrative medical practice was ended by the war.
Yossarian remembers trying to disrupt the educational meeting in Captain
Black's intelligence tent by asking unanswerable questions, which caused
Group Headquarters to make a rule that the only people who could ask questions were the ones who never did. This rule comes from Colonel
Cathcart and Lieutenant Colonel Korn, who also approved the skeet shooting range where Yossarian can never hit anything. Dunbar loves shooting skeet because he hates it and it makes the time go more slowly; his goal is to live as long as possible by slowing down time, so he loves boredom and discomfort, and he argues about this with Clevinger.

Doc Daneeka lives in a tent with an alcoholic Indian named Chief White
Halfoat, where he tells Yossarian about some sexually inept newlyweds he had in his office once. Chief White Halfoat comes in and tells Yossarian that Doc Daneeka is crazy and then relates the story of his own family: everywhere they went, someone struck oil, and so oil companies sent agents and equipment to follow them wherever they went. Doc Daneeka still refuses to ground Yossarian, who asks if he would be grounded if he were crazy. Doc
Daneeka says yes, and Yossarian decides to go crazy. But that solution is too easy: there is a catch. Doc Daneeka tells Yossarian about Catch-22, which holds that, to be grounded for insanity, a pilot must ask to be grounded, but that any pilot who asks to be grounded must be sane.
Impressed, Yossarian takes Doc Daneeka's word for it, just as he had taken
Orr's word about the flies in Appleby's eyes. Orr insists there are flies in Appleby's eyes, and though Yossarian has no idea what Orr means, he believes Orr because he has never lied to him before. They once told
Appleby about the flies, so that Appleby was worried on the way to a briefing, after which they all took off in B-25s for a bombing run.
Yossarian shouted directions to the pilot, McWatt, to avoid antiaircraft fire while Yossarian dropped the bombs. Another time while they were taking evasive action Dobbs went crazy and started screaming "Help him," while the plane spun out of control and Yossarian believed he was going to die. In the back of the plane, Snowden was dying.

Chapters 6-10

Hungry Joe has his fifty missions, but the orders to send him home never come, and he continues to scream all through every night. Doc Daneeka persists in feeling sorry for himself while ignoring Hungry Joe's problems.
Hungry Joe is driven crazy by noises, and is mad with lust--he is desperate to take pictures of naked women, but the pictures never come out. He pretends to be an important Life magazine photographer, and the irony is that he really was a photographer for Life before the war. Hungry Joe has flown six tours of duty, but every time he finishes one Colonel Cathcart raises the number of missions required before Hungry Joe is sent home. When this happens, the nightmares stop until Hungry Joe finishes another tour.
Colonel Cathcart is very brave about sending his men into dangerous situations--no situation is too dangerous, just as no ping-pong shot is too hard for Appleby. One night Orr attacked Appleby in the middle of a game; a fight broke out, and Chief White Halfoat busted Colonel Moodus, General
Dreedle's son-in-law, in the nose. General Dreedle enjoyed that so much he kept calling Chief White Halfoat in to repeat the performance--but the
Indian remains a marginal figure in the camp, much like Major Major, who was promoted to squadron commander while playing basketball and who has been ostracized ever since. Also, Ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen explains to
Yossarian how Catch-22 requires him to fly the extra missions Colonel
Cathcart orders, even though Twenty-Seventh Air Force regulations only demand forty missions.

Yossarian's pilot, McWatt, is possibly the craziest of all the men, because he is perfectly sane but he does not mind the war. He is smiling and polite and loves to whistle show tunes. He is impressed with Milo--but not as impressed as Milo was with the letter Yossarian got from Doc Daneeka about his liver, which ordered the mess hall to give Yossarian all the fresh fruit he wanted, which, in turn, Yossarian refused to eat, because if his liver improved he couldn't go to the hospital whenever he wanted. Milo is involved in the black market, and he tries to convince Yossarian to go in with him in selling the fruit, but Yossarian refuses. Milo is indignant when he learns that a C.I.D. (Criminal Investigation Division) man is searching for a criminal who has been forging Washington Irving's name in censored letters--it is Yossarian who used to pass time in the hospital by writing the letters. But Milo is convinced the C.I.D. man is trying to set him up because of his black market activity. Milo wants to organize the men into a syndicate, as he demonstrates by returning McWatt's stolen bedsheet in pieces--half for McWatt, a quarter for Milo, and so on. Milo has a grasp on some confusing economics: he manages to make a profit buying eggs in
Malta for seven cents apiece and selling them in Pianosa for five cents apiece.

Not even Clevinger understands that, but though he is a dope, he usually understands everything, except why Yossarian insists that so many people are trying to kill him. Yossarian remembers training in America with
Clevinger under Lieutenant Scheisskopf, who was obsessed with parades, and whose wife, along with her friend Dori Duz, used to sleep with all the men under her husband's command. Lieutenant Scheisskopf hated Clevinger, and finally got him sent to trial under a belligerant colonel. Clevinger is stunned when he realizes that Lieutenant Scheisskopf and the colonel truly hate him, in a way that no enemy soldier ever could.

Given a horrible name at birth because of his father's horrible sense of humor, Major Major Major was chagrined when, the day he joined the army, he was promoted to Major by an IBM machine with an equally horrible sense of humor, making him Major Major Major Major. Major Major Major Major also looks vaguely like Henry Fonda, and did so well in school that he was suspected of being a Communist and monitored by the FBI. His sudden promotion stunned his drill sergeant, who had to train a man who was suddenly his superior officer. Luckily, Major Major applied for aviation cadet training, and was sent to Lieutenant Scheisskopf. Not long after arriving in Pianosa, he was made squadron commander by an irate Colonel
Cathcart, after which he lost all his new friends. Major Major has always been a drab, mediocre sort of person, and had never had friends before; he lapses into an awkward depression and refuses to be seen in his office except when he isn't there. To make himself feel better, Major Major forges
Washington Irving's name to official documents. He is confused about everything, including his official relationship to Major ----- de Coverley, his executive officer: He doesn't know whether he is Major ----- de
Coverlay's subordinate, or vice versa. A C.I.D. man comes to investigate the Washington Irving scandal, but Major Major denies knowledge, and the incompetent C.I.D. man believes him--as does another C.I.D. man who arrives shortly thereafter, then leaves to investigate the first C.I.D. man. Major
Major takes to wearing dark glasses and a false mustache when forging
Washington Irving's name. One day Major Major is tackled by Yossarian, who demands to be grounded. Sadly, Major Major tells Yossarian that there is nothing he can do.

Clevinger's plane disappeared in a cloud off the coast of Elba, and he is presumed dead. Yossarian finds the disappearance as stunning as that of a whole squadron of sixty-four men who all deserted in one day. Then he tells ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen the news, but ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen isn't impressed with the disappearance. Ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen continually goes
AWOL, then is required to dig holes and fill them up again--work he seems to enjoy. One day ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen nicked a water pipe, and water sprayed everywhere, leading to mass confusion much like that of the night seven months later when Milo bombed the camp. Word spread that the water was oil, and Chief White Halfoat was kicked off the base. Around this time,
Appleby tried to turn Yossarian in for not taking his Atabrine tablets, but the only time he was allowed to go into Major Major's office was when Major
Major wasn't there. Yossarian remembers Mudd, a soldier who died immediately after arriving at the camp, and whose belongings are still in
Yossarian's tent. The belongings are contaminated with death in the same way that the whole camp was contaminated before the deadly mission of the
Great Big Siege of Bologna, for which Colonel Cathcart bravely volunteered his men. During this time even sick men were not allowed to be grounded by doctors. Dr. Stubbs is overwhelmed with cynicism, and asks what the point is of saving lives when everyone dies anyway. Dunbar says that the point is to live as long as you can and forget about the fact that you will eventually die.

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