Blog > Book - Catch 22

The book Catch 22 is quite famous, so I let you look over the Internet to find about its synopsis and context. Here are the highlights I want to remember from this reading.

The first third of the book revolves around presenting Catch-22 examples, being the epitome of them the one about insanity:

Chapter 5 Chief White Halfoat, page 62

"Sure there's a catch," Doc Daneeka replied. "Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty [by pleading insanity] isn't really crazy."

The book goes on with several absurdities around officers, like this:

Chapter 19 Colonel Cathcart, page 242

If someone did have to become indispensable to him, Colonel Cathcart lamented, it could just as easily have been someone wealthy and well groodmed, someone from a better family who was more mature than Colonel Korn and who did not treat Colonel Cathcart's desire to become a general as frivolously as Colonel Cathcart secretly suspected Colonel Korn secretly did.

By the second half, the books becomes quite repetitive for me. The key message is repeated once and again:

(at the end of) Chapter 27 Nurse Duckett, page 387

'... They are not going to send a crazy man out to be killed, are they?'

'Who else will go?'

By the end of the book, people around Yossarian (the main characer) start to die more often and things get gloomier.

When I finished reading, I was not sure to have understood much of the characters. In particular, Nately's Whore was kind of obscure to me, though I felt her as an impersonation of the war itself. Other people think differently, so it would require reading a commented by the author version of the book to get all this. If we don't have the author's interpretation (not sure if Joseph Heller ever wrote such commentary) relying on personal interpretations might get things a bit out-of-hand; as, for example, referring to Orr as the representation of the Sun.

I cannot help thinking there is a more general catch-22 situation about the book, or about the readers. Like that I have to despise the book to fully appreciate it.

For the moment, I just tallied the book from the reading list and moved along. Perhaps in the future I will be eager for reading it again, as it happened to me with Neuromancer. But nothing else so far.