QueenLyssa's Full Review: Joseph Heller - Catch-22
You're a sane person. You're placed in a situation where strangers try to kill you, your friends can be smiling one day and gone the next, your superiors plot parades and the demise of each others' careers, and your roommate is a Dead Man. What do you do? Hope to hell you have a chronic pain in your liver that falls just short of jaundice.
Catch-22 tells the story of John Yossarian, an American bombardier based off Italy near the end of World War II. A rational and realistic person, Yossarian is forced to deal with the irrational and surreal on a daily basis, from the sheer terror of flying through clouds of flak to the insane acts committed by the officers on his side. He takes it all quite personally. While some think winning the war is a good enough ideal, Yossarian sets his sights on winning the war and surviving. As time goes on, just surviving becomes enough.
Besides the enemy's attempts to murder him, Yossarian's survival is threatened by the Army's secret weapon, Catch-22. A malleable and unwritten regulation, Catch-22 thwarts his every attempt to make it out of the war in one piece. For example, according to Catch-22, anyone willing to risk their life flying missions is obviously insane and unfit to fly, but by realizing this and asking to be grounded, they show themselves to be sane and therefore have to be kept on duty. It's some catch, Catch-22. His superior officers are no help in his quest to live, either, caught up in a game of competitive politics, propaganda, and publicity that results in the number of missions he has to fly before he can go home being raised every time he gets close. His only safe haven is the base hospital, which he can get himself into with a little creativity and an imaginary liver condition, but even then he finds his existence in peril since people in hospitals die. Add to this the occasional mass poisoning or bombing of the base in the interests of profit at the hands of the enterprising mess hall officer Milo Minderbinder and there's no way out.
Yossarian is surrounded by a cast of implausible but frighteningly real characters that make the staff of M*A*S*H look positively flat. Besides Milo Minderbinder, the profiteering yet painfully earnest mess hall officer who views a world war as his private enterprise, there are rich gems like Dunbar, Yossarian's best friend who schemes to increase his lifespan through cultivating boredom, Clevinger, the passionate patriot who believes everything his country tells him and is therefore considered a hopeless sap, Doc Daneeka, the company physician with a hobby of hypochondria, Orr, Yossarian's lunatic roommate who just might be the only sane person there, Major Major Major, the squadron commander with an unfortunate resemblance to Henry Fonda and the determination to never be seen by anyone, and Ex-PFC Wintergreen, the clever enlisted man who mysteriously wields his power over four-star generals.
Joseph Heller's incongruous timeline is as integral to the telling of this story as his wildly hilarious characters. Events flow together and overlap each other in a slightly unsettling manner that follows emotion, mood, and flight of thought more than plot line. The effect is rather like war itself, disturbing and surreal, interlacing humor and horror unpredictably.
Written with a hard-edged style, Heller provides us with more than an insight on the madness of war; he gives us lessons on dealing with the unpredictable nature of life itself. Catch-22 is not only a must-read, but a timeless classic you'll reread and pass onto others.
The textbook, Catch-22, by Joseph Heller, available in Paperback. Published by: Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Edition: . ISBN10: 0684833395. ISBN13: 97...More at Textbooks.com
Catch-22 is like no other novel we have ever read. It has its own style, its own rationale, its own extraordinary character. It moves back and forth f...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.