Catch-22

I'm half way through a new semester at college and instead of writing NaNoWriMo this year, I thought I would use the writing motivation to catch up on my blog. For this post, a novel I just finished reading for my Modern American Novel class, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller.

Even though I finished this book last week, I'm still not sure how I feel about it. I appreciate it, and I enjoyed it in parts, but it's not a book I can see myself ever rereading. In short, the novel is centered around Yossarian and his time stationed in Italy during World War II. But the novel doesn't have a linear structure. It jumps around Yossarian's timeline- repeating events with more details, switching scenes in the middle of a chapter, etc. Actually, there's nothing in the novel that's linear except the growing number of missions that the men are forced to fly so that Colonel Cathcart can get promoted and be famous.

This novel was published in 1961. The lack of logic in the novel is an extension of the "Theatre of the Absurd" movement. Plays like "Waiting for Godot", "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?", and "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead" were popular. This movement focused on absurdity in a world where there is no cosmological meaning or order. After World War II, people suffered a loss of faith and a lack of virtue, especially as America entered the Vietnam War in 1955. This movement in art reflected the public's opinion that words were insufficient tools for communication through a lack of dramatic conflict, plot, character development, and meaningful dialogue.

If you mention "catch-22" to anyone, they probably think of the logical definition of being caught in an endless loop. A common example is that you have to have experience to get a job, but you first have to get a job to gain experience. That stemmed from this novel. While I value the novel and the impact it had, I felt like most of the prose was there for the sake of the overall meaning. This contributes to the lasting literary value of the work, but even after I finished the novel, I still didn't really care about any of the characters (except maybe the Chaplain) and I won't want to revisit them anytime soon.