Blog Away Folks!
So sorry guys. I probably should have posted this earlier, but anyways, the blogspot is here so blog on...
posted by JananaC at 12/28/2006 06:59:00 PM
posted by JananaC at 12/28/2006 06:59:00 PM
3 Comments:
First of all, I thought the opening line of this novel "It was love at first sight," was an amazing opener. It makes no sense, and isn't that sort of a running gag of the novel? Everyone is having nonsensical conversations and doing nonsensical things.
Every character in the novel is running in a circle, which is essentailly what a catch 22 is: something you hate to do, but you'd have to be crazy to stop doing it. No one can resolve their own problems (of course no one's problems are as bad as Doc Daneeka's are), but they aren't really trying. All they care about is going home. Well, all of them except people like Captain Black. All he seems to want is to be promoted.
How is everyone reconciling the timeline of Catch-22? I honestly cannot tell what is past, present, or future in this novel. Heller writes "after" and "before" and "later," but it doesn't seem to really mean anything.
And finally, ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen is my favorite character and I really have no idea why. I find this perplexing because he's kind of a loser with no redeeming qualities. I think it stems from the confusion he caused by naming the only profitable living poet to General Peckem.
I also find it particularly telling that Wintergreen's punishment for going AWOL -- digging and refilling holes -- has nothing to do with the war, and yet it is what he is supposed to be doing to advance the Allies. Its another example of the futility that these men are forced to operate under.
Alright. So I guess I'll start off just on Heller's style of characterization in this book, which I find ridiculously canny and hilarious (i.e. the whole Bob Fonda sickly resemblance deal for Major Major, etc. etc.). It always seems to give a really good sense of the characters in an extremely comical manner. Okay and I have to completely agree with Jill about Appleby and the whole Forest Gump deal. Just the way the character descriptions generally flow and go down in this book, in some corky way, is just sort of endearing--like the way Heller keeps all jis characters' individual anomalies running through constantly in the book dialogue and story (like in Chapter 6 when he had been talking about Hungry Joe's "inverted set of responses" and then later when Doc Daneeka tells Yossarian about the increase in requisite missions, he breathes a huge sigh of relief). His general style and layout of the whole book just sort of reminded me of Stoppard and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, especially the nonsense and futility that the men operate under, like Michelle so fittingly blogged on earlier. The book itself is just so witty and comical and in a way, really in-your-face and just completely amusing (like on page 88 when the colonel and Popinjay got into an argument over reading the last line, I wrote down some other page numbers and examples, but there's just way too many).
All the characters just seem so crazy, the way they have a tendency to take things literally in conversation (all the verbal irony and whatnot) but they also do it so earnestly that it's almost sort of endearing. I reacted the same way when we were reading Ros and Guil are Dead. Sometimes it just seemed to me that a lot of the characters are intended to represent typical personas that you can find in society, like Doc Daneeka and his self-pity and selfish greed for example.
I think it also sort of compels the reader to re-examine life and what catch-22's there are in your own life and society, like Jill said, it seems applicable to a lot. There just seems to be a lot of thematic parallels established between the running catch-22 in this book and everyday society and life. A lot of the paradoxical tendencies and irony of the book somewhat sadly, do seem to reflect a lot that actually does go on.
I just cannot say enough how much I love Heller's style, in nearly every few pages you can find some really amusing phrase like when he talked about planes in the sky (or something of the sort) being flung across the sky like prayers. The way he sets up the character interplay and the narration is just completely hilarious. This is one of those books that after reading just the first few chapters, you just know you're going to have to come back and read it again.
Having come thus far in the book, I think I'm starting to get a sense of the message Heller is trying to communicate, the theme of the book, if you will. However, I feel disinclined to assert anything just yet (heh). So we all pretty much know that the novel satirizes war, particularly through the backdrop of World War II. I've been noticing that Heller particularly bashes the utterly pointless, nonsensical quality of the war, as well as the sort of individuals who keep it going and going and going. I think if you take a look at the less charming characters, it seems pretty clear that Heller uses them as a sort of vehicle for his criticism on the kinds of people in society that he makes you see are really only fit for revilement. Their actions and standpoints are just so completely absurd, vapid and inane. The completely nonsensical xenophobia and bigoted, unsubstantiated paranoia that’s expressed, for instance, seems to reoccur in the book. "Yossarian...there were so many esses in it. It just had to be subversive. It was like the word subversive itself...like seditious and insidious too, and like socialist, suspicious, fascist, and Communist. It was an odious, alien, distasteful name, a name that just did not inspire confidence...not at all like such clean, crisp, honest, American names as Cathcart, Peckem, and Dreedle." (220, Heller) As sad as it is, this is the sort of bigotry that a not insignificant number of Americans during WWII were subscribing to. There was the whole anti-Communist crusade, both Red Scares (which really still has marks in society today), the House of Un-American Activities—Heller just puts it much more bluntly and straightforward than most of us are comfortable doing. “There was a much lower death rate inside the hospital than outside the hospital, and a much healthier death rate. Few people died unnecessarily. People knew a lot more about dying inside the hospital and made a much neater, more orderly job of it.” (175, Heller) Just another ironic truth Heller slams in our faces—or is it even ironic at all? Maybe we are all living in an ever increasingly degenerate society. I feel disheartened.
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