Catch22 Essay Research Paper The Function of

Catch-22 Essay, Research Paper

The Function of Themes in Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

Joseph Heller produced many works of literature throughout his lifetime; however, his most acclaimed novel, Catch-22, has become a cult class among readers throughout the world. Catch-22 is not a bland novel that invokes few emotions from its readers. It is a moving novel stacked full of many themes. These themes indubitably conjure up fear and mistrust of the system that seeks to destroy one’s own life.

Joseph Heller was born on May 1, 1923, in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn, New York, to Russian-Jewish immigrants. His father Isaac (Pinsker 228), a bakery truck driver, died when Heller was only four years of age (Kaupunginkirjasta online). During World War II, Heller served as a bombardier for the United States Air Force and flew sixty bombing missions while stationed in Italy. This gave him the background for Catch-22 (Classic online). Specifically, while on a combat mission, Heller witnessed one of his fellow airmen die of wounds; this ultimately led to Heller’s graphic portrayal of Snowden, a young airman in Catch-22, who dies a horrid death during a bombing run (Pinsker 383).

After being discharged from the Air Force, Heller enrolled in the University of Southern California and later transferred to New York University where he majored in English. Upon finishing his studies in New York, Heller attended Columbia University until 1949, when he received his Master of the Arts Degree in English (Pinsker 383). After receiving his degree, Heller went on to become a professor at Pennsylvania State University where he taught English for two years (Classic online). In 1961, after a series of jobs working for such magazines as Time and Look, Heller published Catch-22, which he had been working on since 1953(Classic online). After Catch-22 was published in 1961 (Kaupunginkirjasta online), Heller continued his writing career with Something Happened in 1974, Good as Gold in 1974, God Knows in 1984, Picture This in 1988, and Closing Time in 1994 (Pinsker 379). Although not as well received as Catch-22, Closing Time serves as a sequel to Catch-22 in which the heroes are described forty years after the original novel (Kaupunginkirjasta online). Sadly on December 3, 1999, Joseph Heller died of a heart attack at his home in Long Island, New York (Kaupunginkirjasta online). Heller’s career and personality was best described by Brustein when he said “He has Mailer’s combustible radicalism without his passion for violence and self-glorification; he has Bellow’s gusto with his compulsion to affirm the unaffirmable; and he has Salinger’s wit without his coquettish self-consciousness (Brustein 228).”

Catch-22 was Heller’s first real success as an author. It has been received with both excessively positive and odiously negative critiques and comments. In addition, some critics only provided statements that were commentary, rather than commendations or denunciations.

A few critics only supplied a general interpretation of Catch-22 that includes brief commentary about the work. One such comment was made by Raymond Olderman in which he says, “Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 deals with more that the lusty evils of battle, it is a book written for a decade of readers who have been warned about the dangers of the military-industrial complex” (Olderman 229). Another comment was made by Robert Brustein, who said, “[Catch-22] speaks solidly to those who are disaffected, discontented, and disaffiliated, and yet those who want to react to life positively” (Burstein 135).

Those who support it have often said that Joseph Heller’s work of Catch-22 truly demonstrates his extraordinary talents (Brustein 228). Bryant went as far as to say, “Better than almost any other single war novel, Catch-22 illustrates the main issues of the ‘open decisions [decisions made by one's self],’ laying out clearly the factors which inhabit its highest good and suggesting ways in which those factors can be overcome” (Bryant 228). Bryant also went on to say that “Catch-22 is the great social tautology that imprisons every individual who takes it as a natural absolute and does not see that it is a kind of language-game (Bryant 229). Others such as Pinsker state that “Catch-22’s extraordinary achievement can be measured in terms of its radical departure from the convictions that had governed previous war novels” (Pinsker 381).

Most negative criticism of Catch-22 centers around Heller’s style in the novel. Specifically, they feel the novel lacks unity and coherence. Many critics go as far as to say “Catch-22 is not even a good novel by convential standards” (Prescott online). Burhans, for example, attributes this to ” the constant episodic zigzags which comprise Catch-22’s narrative surface” (230). Others credit their negative criticism to “Catch-22’s dizzying repetitions and seemingly disjointed narrative” (Pinsker 385). Similarly, Brustein says that Catch-22 contains “some of the most outrageous sequence since A Night at the Opera” (228).

The themes of Catch-22 depict the classic struggle between man’s desire to survive and the system’s desire to crush man for its own gain. The central theme of the novel expresses the preposterousness and the excesses of life during wartime, while it points out the madness of the bureaucratic systems (”Themes” online). This madness is best displayed