"Joseph Heller was born in Brooklyn in 1923. He served as an Air Force bombardier in World War II and enjoyed a long career as a writer and a teacher. His best-selling books include Something Happened, Good as Gold, Picture This, God Knows, and Closing Time, but his first novel, Catch-22, remains his most famous and acclaimed work. He died of a heart attack in December 1999.
"Heller wrote Catch-22 while working at a New York City marketing firm producing ad copy. The novel draws heavily on his Air Force experience and presents a war story that is at once hilarious, grotesque, cynical, and stirring. The novel generated a great deal of controversy upon its initial publication in 1961. Critics tended either to adore it or despise it, and those who hated it did so for the same reasons as the critics who loved it. Over time, Catch-22 has become one of the defining novels of the twentieth century. It presents an utterly unsentimental vision of war, stripping all romantic pretenses away from combat, replacing visions of glory and honor with a kind of nightmarish comedy of violence, bureaucracy, and paradoxical madness. This kind of irony has come to be expected of war novels since the Vietnam War, but in the wake of World War II, which most Americans believed was a just and heroic war, Catch-22 was shocking. It proved almost prophetic about both the Vietnam War, a conflict that began a few years after the novel was originally published, and the sense of disillusionment about the military that many Americans experienced during this conflict.
"Unlike other antiromantic war novels, such as Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Catch-22 relies heavily on humor to convey the insanity of war, presenting the horrible meaninglessness of armed conflict through a kind of desperate absurdity rather than through graphic depictions of suffering and violence. Catch-22 also distinguishes itself from other antiromantic war novels through its core values: the story of Yossarian, the protagonist, is ultimately not one of despair but one of hope. He believes that the positive urge to live and to be free can redeem the individual from the dehumanizing machinery of war. The novel is told as a series of loosely related, tangential stories in no particular chronological order. The narrative that emerges from this structural tangle upholds the value of the individual in the face of the impersonal, collective military mass; at every stage it mocks insincerity and hypocrisy, even when such values appear triumphant.
"Despite its World War II setting, Catch-22 is often thought of as a signature novel of the 1960s and 1970s. It was during those decades that American youth truly began to question authority. Hippies, university protests, and the civil rights movement all marked the 1960s as a decade of revolution, and Heller’s novel fit in perfectly with the spirit of the times. In fact, Heller once said, “I wasn’t interested in the war in Catch-22. I was interested in the personal relationships in bureaucratic authority.” Whether Heller was using the war to comment on authority or using bureaucracy as a statement about the war, it is clear that Catch-22 is more than just a war novel. It is also a novel about the moral choices that every person must make when faced with a system of authority whose rules are both immoral and illogical."
This book was published the year I was born. I did not read it in college. I suspect that it was standard reading for college students in the 60's and 70's. I was in college in the 80's.
This was a tough book to read. There is some gore, but honestly not a lot. And that is not what made it tough. It was the absurdity that was hard (for me). In the beginning it reminded me a lot of the humor/absurdity of The Confederacy of Dunces. The topics are not at all the same. Catch-22 is sort of that old "Who's on first?" routine gone to war.
My husband had read it (on his own, not in college) and actually loved it. But he told me (as soon as I started complaining about it) that I was probably not going to like it (all the way to the end).
To be very honest, I had to make myself stay with it through disc 6 (there were 15 discs, so well over 15 hours).
Then at disc 7 (almost half way) I ran into people who had read it in college and they all told me to stick with it.
They did not tell me I would love it, they told me it was an important novel that they were surprised I had not read in college.
And I ran into people who never finished it because they couldn't stick with it.
At that point it was exactly like it is at the half way point of a hard exercise class. Am I going to walk out when the real benefit is just about to start? When I could be DONE (with a feeling of accomplishment rather than defeat which does not feel good to me)? Not likely.
The second half the book was easier (for me) to read/listen than the first. I think there was slightly less of the "who's on first?" shtick going although it remained loyal to the absurdity of war all the way to the end.
To be honest, I listened to half, took a time out to listen to Treasure Island for a book review meeting, and then finished the second half. So, Catch-22 was in my life for almost three weeks. Certainly not as long as war impacts people's lives, but long enough for me.
I would have enjoyed it more (my first read) if it was part of the curriculum for a college class.
Yes, in the end, now that it is done, I am glad I read it.
No, I would not read it a second time. If it were assigned for another reading group, I would refresh my brain with SparkNotes and happily go discuss it.
