Literary criticism- catches 22

Introduction

Joseph Heller was born on May 1, 1923, in New York City, and grew up near the Coney Island amusement park. His parents, recent Russian immigrants, spoke little English, and his father died when Joseph was only five years old. After graduating from high school, Heller joined the Army Air Corps in 1942, and flew sixty bombing missions in a B-25 before being discharged in 1945. Heller entered college after the war, earning a bachelor's degree from New York University followed by a master's degree from Columbia University, and studied for a year at Oxford on a Fulbright scholarship. He returned from England in 1950 and taught English at Pennsylvania State University but left to work in magazine advertising because he felt uncomfortable in the academic world (James, 262-290).

In 1945 Heller began publishing short stories in magazines such as Story, Esquire, and the Atlantic Monthly, but it was not until 1955 that he began work on Catch-22. Although the completed manuscript passed from publisher to publisher before Simon and Schuster agreed to take a chance on it, the novel became an instant success upon its publication in 1961. Before the 1960s were over, Catch-22 was recognized as one of the decade's most representative works of art (Hugh, 255).

Catch-22 is a product of intense private and public concerns. Heller based the novel's plot on his memories of World War II bombing missions; he derived its ironic tone and thematic substance from such sources as his father's early death, the grotesque Coney Island neighborhood of his youth, the fast-paced, disjointed world of advertising, and his anxiety over the Korean War and Cold War tensions with China and Russia. Heller translated the intergroup antagonism that prevailed in the United States after the Second World War-the Communist witch hunts led by Senator Joseph McCarthy and the racial hatred that surfaced when southern schools began to be integrated-into the conflict between the common soldiers and the officers of Catch-22 (Heller, 50-52).

In Heller's novel, the military's Catch-22 states that if a man is crazy, he must be grounded-but a man cannot be grounded if he asks to be, since anyone who wants to avoid combat duty is not really crazy. Catch-22 abounds with paradoxes and inversions, as Heller depicts a topsy-turvy society in which sanity and insanity, order and chaos have become confused. Colonel Korn permits only those people who never ask Questions to ask Questions; Major Major orders Sergeant Tower to allow men to see him only when he is out; the Air Force denies the death of Mudd, who was killed before officially checking in with the squadron but declares Doc Daneeka officially dead despite Doc's fervent protests; Aarfy commits murder, but the police choose instead to arrest Yossarian for going AWOL. Heller presents a world that seems to lack rationality, justice, or humanity, in which the individual becomes alienated, frustrated, and desperate (Craig, 27-54).

Analysis

The novel's Setting is the mythical island of Pianosa, modeled closely on Corsica and located off the coast ...