Literature Analysis Two

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

1. Briefly summarize the plot of the novel you read.
2. Succinctly describe the theme of the novel. Avoid cliches.
3. Describe the author's tone.  Include three excerpts that illustrate your point(s).
4. Describe five literary elements/techniques you observed that strengthened your understanding of the theme and/or your sense of the tone.  Include three excerpts that will help your reader understand each one.

1. Catch-22 is a story of a man named John Yossarian whose job is to bomb places he and his companions are told to for the US Air Force during the WW2. However, Yossarian believes that everyone is trying to get rid of him, so he's main goal is to survive the war and go home. However, the Colonel Cathcart kept raising the number of missions the soldiers needed to complete in order for them to be sent home. The soldiers, therefore, have to keep fighting, which may be never. The novel doesn't follow a specific time frame, rather, it flashes back and forth throughout the story much like a war. Yossarian doesn't want to fight, so he asks Doc Daneeka if he can ground him for insanity, but the doctor refuses. He reasons that only sane people ask to be insane. So Yossarian finds an alternative to be hospitalized by faking a liver condition. Later, he does what he can to delay the mission in Bologna. Hungry Joe, one Yossarian's companion, has flown the required missions, but everytime he reaches the number, the colonels raise the number of missions so that Joe can't go home. This causes Joe to have nightmares and he goes crazy. Later on in the story, Yossarian is made a deal that if he praises the officers and the colonels, then they will let him go home. He, however, knows that this will mean that he will betray his fellow soldiers and refuses the offer. He escapes the military and tries to seek for his life.     

2. The major theme of the novel is the totalitarianism of the bureaucracy. The characters are not solely responsible for their death rather, the authority is. Whenever the soldiers try to reason with them logically, the authorities don't listen to them and reason back with illogical terms. When the soldiers finish their missions which is required to go home, the authorities raise the number of missions they need to accomplish everytime they are close to finishing them. Since the soldiers are aware of this, they try their best to utilize what they can do.

3. The tone of this novel is mostly serious and at times, satirical. Since this is a war novel, there are many scenes where the main character fears for his life and wants to avoid going into combat. He knows that many soldiers died during the battle and he doesn't want to.

• "There was no established procedure for evasive action. All you needed was fear, and Yossarian had plenty of that, more fear than Orr or Hungry Joe, more fear even than Dunbar, who had resigned himself submissively to the idea that he must die someday. Yossarian had not resigned himself to that idea, and he bolted for his life wildly on each mission the instant his bombs were away, hollering, "hard, hard, hard, hard, you bastard, hard!" at McWatt and hating McWatt viciously all the time as though McWatt were to blame for their being up there at all to be rubbed out by strangers..."

• "Help who? Help who?" called back Yossarian, once he had plugged his headset back into the intercom system, after it had been jerked out when Dobbs wrested the controls away from Huple and hurled them all down suddenly into the deafening, paralyzing, horrifying dive which had plastered Yossarian helplessly to the ceiling of the plane by the top of his head and from which Huple had rescued them just in time by seizing the controls back from Dobbs and leveling the ship out almost as suddenly right back in the middle of the buffeting layer of cacophonous flak from which they had escaped successfully only a moment before. Oh, God! Oh, God, oh, God, Yossarian had been pleading wordlessly as he dangled from the ceiling of the nose of the ship by the top of his head, unable to move."

• Major Major sat down, and Yossarian moved around in front of his desk and told him that he did not want to fly any more combat missions. What could he do? Major Major asked himself. All he could do was what he had been instructed to do by Colonel Korn and hope for the best. "Why not?" he asked. "I'm afraid." "That's nothing to be ashamed of," Major Major counseled him kindly. "We're all afraid." "I'm not ashamed," Yossarian said. "I'm just afraid."

4. The five literary elements that were helpful to understand the theme and the tone were:

1) Symbolism: The hospital in the novel symbolizes the shelter and the refuge people seek to go to avoid the war.

2) Allusion: In the story, Heller mentions many allusions such as Washington Irving who is constantly repeated, Michael de Montaigne, Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, the Bible, and Homer. These references related to the scenes when they were used and further enhanced my understanding of the novel by helping me make connections.

3) Imagery: With the imagery, it helped to visualize what the characters were actually seeing and experiencing during their battle.

"Yossarian was cold, too, and shivering uncontrollably. He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden’s secret. Drop him out a window and he’ll fall. Set fire to him and he’ll burn. Bury him and he’ll rot, like other kinds of garbage. That was Snowden’s secret. Ripeness was all."
4) Alliteration: The following alliteration helped me to makes connections with the occupation and their field of study.

"There was a urologist for his urine, a lymphologist for his lymph, an endocrinologist for his endocrines, a psychologist for his psyche, a dermatologist for his derma; there was a pathologist for his pathos, a cystologist for his cysts..."

5) Repetition: Heller uses this to explain deeper about the situation: what caused the event, what the consequences were, etc.

“McWatt was crazy. He was a pilot and flew his plane as low as he dared over Yossarian’s tent as often as he could, just to see how much he could frighten him…Sharcare. He was crazy too”