TRACE THE PASSAGE OF YOSSARIAN FROM NONHERO

TRACE THE PASSAGE OF YOSSARIAN FROM NON-HERO TO ANTIHERO Essay, Research Paper

The character of Yossarian has been described and interpreted in many different ways; some view him as an eternal innocent in the Huck Finn tradition of American protagonists, some a symbol of humanistic faith, others argue for Christian interpretations of his character, while others consider him as an antihero in an insane world. Certainly by the end of the novel, one is more likely to hold the latter judgement as being true than after the opening half of the book. Yossarian’s viewpoint and attitude changes during the book, and with it our opinion of him. There is an absence of ultimate meaning from the world of Catch 22, as Yossarian’s discussions in the hospital and in bed with Scheisskopf’s wife make clear, God is not in heaven, and even if he were he would only preside incompetently over a cruelly bungled universe, dominated by pointless death and arbitrary injustice. The institutions of Catch 22 have been created to preserve ideals and order, but end up serving the cosmic facts of death and injustice. So, how does our hero Yossarian face this fact. Is he merely a passive, rationalistic, hopelessly ineffectual victim-hero, dominated by situation rather than creating or acting to change it. Does he, like Camus’s Absurd Man, acknowledge the meaningless of the cosmos but assert his individual humanity by struggling in spite of it. Or does he dare to defy the Absurd by continuing to seek purpose in life. Yossarian is not primarily passive or rationalistic, and he is victimised only unwillingly and he can hardly be accused of the Camusian sin of searching for a meaning to life. He does, however, struggle against those forces that would extinguish his existence and conscious free will, without expecting anything but a temporary triumph, as demonstrated by Yossarian’s desperate but ultimately fruitless postponements of the Bologna mission. For him, life and free will is its own reward, and the struggle against the forces that would destroy it, be they natural or man-made, must continue. It is this struggle to preserve self in the face of the war and the morally insane bureaucracy conducting it, that drives Yossarian, and indeed Dunbar, to the brink of genuine insanity by the final section of the book. This insanity reaches it peak in chap ter 39- The Eternal City, when Rome becomes the world, and Yossarian an Everyman confronting the miseries and injustices the world offers up and wrestling with his own responsibility for them. There have been suggestions, even before Yossarian’s journey to the end of the night, that he has had some responsibility for the events thus far. When Milo says “it was all Yossarian’s fault,” he echoes a phrase used much earlier, at the start of chapter 26: “In a way it was all Yossarian’s fault, for if he had not moved the bomb line during the Big Siege of Bologna, Major____de Coverley might still be around to save him, and if he had not stocked the enlisted men’s apartment with girls who had no other place to live, Nately might never have fallen in love with his whore…”. In the context of the narration, ” it ” is not made specifically clear- that is, the “it” in “it was all Yossarian’s fault”. The “he” in the second half of the sentence looks as though it refers to Yossarian, though it must refer to Major____de Coverley. This sentence links, at least grammatically, Nately’s whore and Yossarian’s fault. Indeed some critics have blamed Yossarian directly or indirectly for a surprising number of the novel’s episodes and even deaths. It has been argued that he was responsible for Dobbs not murdering Cathcart, for Nately’s broken nose, for the CID investigations of Major Major and Chaplain Tappman that resulted from his playful censoring of letters, for the inception of Milo’s cartel, which begins with the dried fruit Yossarian is receiving for his non-existent liver condition, for the deaths of Kraft and his crew over Ferrara when Yossarian goes over the target a second time, for Daneeka’s presence on McWatt’s flight register and thus for the bureaucratic death of Daneeka, and more tenuously for many other such incidents. Colonel Cathcart certainly found Yossarian responsible for many of his “black eyes”. However, even when the chain of events doesn’t lead directly back to Yossarian, he is guilty of one common crime through most of the novel, the crime of complicity. Up to chapter 39, like all of his colleagues, Yossarian has let the likes of Cathcart, Korn, and Milo more or less have their way, offering little more than complaints and token resistance, followed by reluctant compliance. When the temptation for a genuine moral stance comes up, as during the briefing before the bombing of the Italian village, Yossarian, like Dunbar, is quickly silenced by Korn’s cynical appeal to survival anxieties: here as at so many other places, Yossarian adopts the Old Man’s ethic of survival, regardless of moral consequences, and at the best he and Dunbar assuage their concerns with subterfuge. Though he has already rebelled and further defied military protocol by heading on his quest through Rome without official permission, Yossarian’s night journey in “The Eternal City” marks his turning point as a moral man. He wanders the surreal streets of the ruined Eternal City, witnessing the eternal injustices of human life in a cosmos that doesn’t care. The scenes of pain, cruelty, and misery that parade