Thanks to a read along on Bluesky, I finally finished Joseph Heller’s madcap satire, Catch-22. (I’ve tried to read the book twice before, but bailed out each time.) I enjoyed reading along with folks online; it reminded me of some of my favorite literature classes, in which I got to dissect texts with my classmates. As for enjoying Catch-22…I’m more equivocal about that. There are some things about this book that have not aged well. On the whole, however, Heller’s satire of absurdity and brutality stands up as an important work of anti-war literature.
Catch-22 is a disorienting read. The book is laid out in a nonlinear structure and bounces around from character to character. Even chapters named for a particular character tend to end up being about someone else entirely, more often than not. This book is also not meant to be entirely realistic. Heller was a pilot during World War II, but the larger purpose of this book is to highlight just how little war makes sense. There are few patriots in this book. (And all the other characters think they’re weird.) Defeating the Nazis is never foremost in anyone’s mind. Instead, we get a colonel who is constantly toting up “black eyes” and “feathers in his cap” as he tries to impress either his general or the media; a general obsessed with parades; and a mega-capitalist who takes things to such extremes that he makes money from the Allies and the Axis, among others. Yossarian and his fellow pilots are caught in the middle as the number of required missions keeps going up and no one gives a shit about whether or not they make it back safely.
Heller’s scenes and characters keep returning to catch-22 in various forms. Yossarian first encounters the term when he tries to get the doctor to ground him. The doctor explains that he can ground Yossarian if he, Yossarian, is insane, but Yossarian isn’t insane for not wanting to fly more missions—not wanting to endanger oneself is a clear marker of sanity. By the brutal end of the novel, catch-22 evolves into “they have the right to do anything we can’t stop them from doing.” Over the course of the novel, we witness characters being disappeared, interrogated, raped, murdered, and more. There is no moral center to this novel unless it’s a void in the midst of all the madness. No one is a force for good in this novel. The characters who manage to muster up a protest fold very quickly in the face of illogic and violence.
One huge problem that I and other readers in the Bluesky read along had with Catch-22 was the portrayal of women. I don’t expect a lot of character development in satire. Satire dials personality quirks up to eleven in order to make its points about how broken systems are. But the women in Catch-22 exist either as sex objects (and some of the scenes of sexual harassment and violence are stomach-turning) or are too old or ugly to be targets for Yossarian and the rest of his comrades. One woman, known only as Nately’s whore, puzzled us when she transformed from an aloof sex object to a murderous harpy who keeps trying to kill Yossarian. While other characters have a smidgen of psychological credibility, Nately’s whore fails to make sense at all.
As a novel set during World War II, a war Americans are taught was a “good war,” Catch-22 is jarring. I didn’t learn about atrocities committed by Allied soldiers until I got to college. The version of history I got was that the United States was attacked first at Pearl Harbor. I was taught that we heroically stepped up to help the Allies fight back against the Nazis and Imperial Japan. I learned about the Allies liberating the death camps across Europe. As I read Catch-22, I kept waiting for someone to make a speech about what Yossarian and the rest of the fliers were fighting for. That speech never came because this isn’t that kind of World War II novel. I had to keep reminding myself that the novel was published in 1961, after the bloody stalemate of the Korean War and only a few years before the horrors of the Vietnam War. From my perspective in 2026, after two wars with Iraq, the war on terror, and the [redacted] going on with Iran, a lot of Catch-22 doesn’t seem so absurd. The things this novel has to say about war—the stupid loss of life, the supremacy of capitalism, the terror of combat, etc.—are still true.