The Struggle For Survival in an Immoral World

in Joseph Heller's Catch-22

by Zeena Alwan Nsayef

‫ للكاتب جوزيف هيلير‬22-‫الصراع من اجل البقاء في عالم غير اخلقاي في رواية كاتش‬

Abstract
Catch-22 is regarded as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. The
events of the novel take place during the late stages of World War11, on the Italian island
of Pianosa that lies in the Mediterranean sea, eight miles south of Elba where the
characters live. Heller uses the military organization as a metaphor for business
relationships and institutional structures. He presents the immorality of the institutions and
the helpless attempts of the individuals to survive at any cost when they are faced with
daily annihilation in a world governed by false values and ideologies.

This research paper concentrates on the attempts of some characters such as

Colonel Cathcart and Milo Minderbider to rise in position at the cost of the lives of others,
following immoral principles and the viciousness of catch-22. On the opposite side, The
protagonist of the novel John Yossarian, who is an American bombardier and whose
flashbacks and memories construct the structure of the novel, tries throughout the novel to
save his skin from war and the horrible chances of death by avoiding flying extra missions. He
suffers from survival anxieties as a reaction to the chaotic and inhuman society to the extent
that everybody thinks him mad.

‫ملخص البحث‬

‫ تقع احداث الرواية في المراحل الخيرة من الحرب العالمية الثانية‬.‫ من اعظم روايات القرن العشرين‬22-‫تعتبر رواية كاتش‬
‫ يستخدم‬.‫في جزيرة بيانوسا الواقاعة في البحر المتوسط و التي تبعد ثمانية اميال جنوب البا حيث تعيش شخصيات الرواية‬
‫ حيث يستعرض ل اخلقاية مؤسسات الدولة و محاولت‬.‫هيلير المنظمة العسكرية كناية لعلقاات العمل و بنى المؤسسات‬
.‫الفراد اليائسة للبقاء على قايد الحياة باي ثمن و هم يواجهون البادة اليومية في عالم تحكمه قايم و ايديولوجيات زائفة‬

‫يركز البحث على محاولت بعض الشخصيات مثل كولونيل كاثكارت و ميلو مايندربايندر للرتقاء في مناصبهم على حساب‬
,‫ يحاول بطل الرواية جون يوساريان‬,‫ من جانب اخر‬.22-‫حياة الخرين و ذلك بتطبيق المبادئ اللاخلقاية و الشريرة لكاتش‬
‫ الفرار بجلده من الحرب طوال الرواية و فرص الموت الفظيعة و ذلك‬,‫وهو طيار امريكي و التي تشكل ذكرياته بناء الرواية‬
‫ فهو يعاني من اضطرابات البقاء على قايد الحياة كرد فعل لهذا المجتمع الوحشي و‬.‫بتجنب القيام بطلعات جوية اضافية‬
.‫الفوضوي لدرجة يعتقد الجميع انه مجنون‬

1
 Introduction

Joseph Heller(1923-1999) is an American novelist, short story writer,

and playwright. He has acquired his fame through writing his notable novel
Catch-22. The title of the novel has entered the English lexicon to refer to a
"vicious circle wherein an absurd, no-win choice, particularly in a situation
in which the desired outcome of the choice is an impossibility, and
regardless of choice, a same negative outcome is a certainty". 1 The novel is
a black humor in which Heller presents a world of death and annihilation
governed by absurd and immoral institutions represented in the novel by
catch-22, and the attempt of the individuals to survive in this chaotic and
deadly word. 2

The setting of the novel is World War II, but most critics agree that the
novel has very little to do with war. Heller himself states in one of his
interviews, in which he minimized the influence of war on the novel, that
"Catch-22 is not really about World War11. It is really about the American
society during the Cold War, during the Korean War, and about the
possibility of a Vietnam"3. Hence, Heller explores the state of society
through war, a society governed by immoral and false ideology of catch-22,
and the attempt of the individual to survive in this disordered and
nightmarish society where death and annihilation are imminent. Tonny
Tanner confirms that the novel is about "the struggle for survival of the
individual within his own society."4 This analysis coincides with Heller's
apparent intentions of writing about "the contemporary regimented
business society depicted against the background of ….inevitable death that
is the lot of all of us."5

2
 Social survival

" The man who declares that survival at all costs is the end of existence
is morally dead, because he is prepared to sacrifice all other values which
give life its meaning." – Sidney Hook.

"…It is better to live on one's feet than dies on one's knees. That is the
way the saying goes"6. Catch-22 is a novel about death and the reaction of
people when they are faced with the daily annihilation. All they try to do is
to survive in the way they can even if they follow immoral principles. The
novel takes place in the island of Pianosa that lies in the Mediterranean sea,
eight miles south of Elba. That is the geographical location of the action.
However, it is worth looking at its world in Kleinian terms; the location of
the story is the inner world called the claustrum "a space inside the psychic
annus,…where everyone lives perpetually in projective identification, and
the only value is survival. If one is expelled from the claustrum, there are
only two places to go: death or psychotic breakdown." 7In these
circumstances, people usually try to build individual and institutional
defenses against the psychotic anxieties caused by the unconscious
phantasies of the threat of annihilation. These defenses are utterly selfish
and survivalist.8So, Catch-22 is based entirely on the internal logic of
survival.9

It is noticeable from the very beginning of the novel that a number of

Air Force officers malinger in a hospital: one is censoring all the enlisted
men's letters and signing the censor's name "Washington Irving," another
pursues tedious conversations with boring Texans in order to increase his
life span by making time pass slowly, and another is storing horse chestnuts

3
in his cheeks to give himself a look of innocence. They try to stay alive as
long as possible.10

Pianosa is an army air force base run by ambitious and arrogant officers
for whom success and failure are the only measures of worth, and survival
is always at risk.11 In career terms, their survival is maintained at the
expense of the survival of the enlisted men who lie below them in the
military hierarchy. The hierarchy includes General Dreedle, who is
astonished to know that he cannot shoot those who irritate him, General
Peckem, head of Special Services, who is interested only in bureaucratic
power in the table of organization and thinks it completely rational that
combat operations should come under his domain, and Colonel Scheisscopf
outwits them all by getting promoted over their heads to Lt. General and is
free to indulge his passion: parades, including precision marching to the
point of tying the men's arms so they won’t swing.

In the squadron, the men are directly answerable to Colonel Cathcart,

who is solely preoccupied with survival and sycophancy. He aspires at
getting his picture into the Saturday Evening Post at any cost. In order to
achieve this goal and impress the generals, he increases the number of
missions his men must fly from forty-five to seventy –eighty during the
course of the novel before being released from combat so that no one is
ever sent home while he has flown only five. Hence, colonel Cathcart
sacrifices the lives of his men in order to get promoted into General and
survive in his career.12

In their attempt to succeed and survive, some colonels humiliate and

put down others as it is exemplified in Captain Black's attempts to get
people consume themselves with envy or, as he puts it," eat their

4
livers"(p.221). Thus, persecution is rampant and the more pointless the
better it is.13The worst persecution of all is to endanger the men to the
point of death by raising the number of missions. Besides, the commanding
officer, General Dreedle believes that "the young men who took orders from
him should be willing to give up their lives for the ideals, aspiration and
idiosyncrasies of the old me he took orders from."(249).

Betrayal of decent values, the notion that one sells one's soul to survive
is rampant in the novel. This is embodied in the character of Milo
Minderbinder.14 He is originally the company mess- officer in the US Air
Force who has created an international syndicate. M&M is everywhere and
cooperates with everyone except the Russians. His credo is the worship of
supply and demand and "the right of free men to pay as much they had to
for the things they needed in order to survive"(p.362). His moral
philosophy is summarized as he states his attitude towards the Germans:"
Maybe they did start the war, and maybe they are killing millions of people,
but they pay their bills a lot more promptly than some allies of ours I could
name".(p.294). Milo's ruthlessness is illustrated when he tries to make the
men in the squadron eat chocolate- covered cotton, and when he bombs his
own squadron in a deal with the Germans. The Germans take the cotton off
Milo's hands seeing that the men won't eat it , and Milo bombs the
Americans for them. He even orders the planes to strafe at the survivors, as
it is in the contract. Milo's logic in his business ventures is that "bribery is
against law…but it's not against law to make a profit, is it? So it can't be
against the law for me to bribe someone in order to make a fair profit, can't
it"(p.305) This aggressive manner makes Milo unstoppable. Since his deals
are so important to the war effort, he makes a deal with the colonels never
to fly combat missions. The consequence, of course, is that someone else's

5
life will be put more at risk15. Hence, both colonel Cathcart and Milo
Minderbinder set up their system of false values and ideology represented
by catch-22 in their attempt to survive in their own chaotic following
inhumane rules.

Self- survival

Amid this world of death and immorality, where people survive at the
cost of the lives of others, the protagonist of the novel, Captain John
Yossarian, lives. He is an American bombardier who lives in the Italian island
Pianosa. He believes that "There was only one catch and that was catch-22,
which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers
that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind."(p.88)
Consequently, he is solely motivated by his determination to stay alive in
the time when most of his fellow soldiers seem unaware of death around
them, and most of his superior officers are hostile to him.16

Yossarian is originally brave, but two incidents have changed him. First,
when he killed his crew Kraft, a harmless skinny kid from Pennsylvania, in
his tenth flying mission. The second episode is Snowden's death which is
echoed throughout the novel through Yossarian's flashbacks. Snowden is a
gunner in Yossarian's plane and Yossarian has tended him when he has
been seriously injured over Avignon. He spilt his guts "literally and
figuratively"17 to show that man is matter and garbage, and, as Vosevich
puts it " it triggers Yossarian's ultimate leap from all consuming thoughts of
self-preservation to the desire to take responsibility for himself and
others."18 As a result of these episodes, Yossarian becomes obsessed with
the idea of survival more than ever. Whenever Cathcart raises the number
of flying missions, Yossarian's chance for survival becomes smaller and

6
smaller.19 He exits the plane as a changed man. He suffers from survival
anxieties; he views Snowden's funeral naked from a tree, receives the
medal standing naked in formation, walks backward in parades, falls madly
in love with every woman he sees, and accuses every one of being crazy. His
comic manner stands as a response to the hopeless situation he finds
himself in. Brustein comments that "From this point on, Yossarian logic
becomes so pure that everyone thinks him mad, for it is the logic of sheer
survival, dedicated to keeping him alive in a world noisily clamoring for his
annihilation."20

Yossarian tries to avoid being victimized by circumstances, a force

represented in the novel as catch-22. For Catch-22 has different definition in
the novel and one of them "is the unwritten law which empowers the
authorities to revoke your right whenever it suits their cruel whims; it is, in
short, the principle of absolute evil in a malevolent, mechanical, and
incompetent world."21 Yossarian pursues his "herculean efforts"22 to stay
alive- through caution, cowardice, defiance, feigning illness and staying at
the hospital as long as possible to avoid flying more missions and prolong
his life span; and poisoning the company's food with laundry soap. He
becomes obsessed with death, dreaming and daydreaming of it. He
imagines that everyone is trying to kill him. He takes the war personally, and
has come to believe that it is he who is in danger and not his country, and
now the moment has come to save his skin from imminent death because
he finally believes that war is made by men and can be ended by them. The
sense of frustration and disgust is intensified more when he goes to the
Eternal City of Rome where he tries to find Nately's whore's kid sister. He
witnesses the corruption, cruelty and destruction in Rome. Having
witnessed the death of his fellow soldiers, his main focus becomes staying

7
alive as "the number of dead people just seemed to increase. And the
Germans were still fighting. Death was irreversible, he suspected, and he
began to think he was going to lose"(398). He suffers from survival
anxieties; sometimes he is hysterical as when he screams at McWatt to take
evasive action from German anti-craft flak. He is depressed by humiliation,
misery, violence, corruption, and crime. By witnessing Snowden's death,
Yossarian is "now at odds with the organizational condition"23under which
the individuals must act. Being traumatized, and feeling entrapped in this
horrible situation, Yossarian seems to adopt a kind of madness as a
defense against the threat of death around him. He is at war with this
inverted world and he must "choose between adapting to the reality of the
situation and losing his self or escaping."24

Finally, Yossarian decides to desert the squadron and cease serving the
institution by flying to neutral Sweden for freedom which he has longed for.
He refuses the offer of Colonels Cathcart and Korn to promote him, give
him another medal and send him home as a hero to do morale-boosting
campaigns and sell war bonds. They want him to like them. Though the deal
is self-serving, Yossarian does not want to betray the men in the squadron.

Thus, Yossarian has proved, in the end, that he is morally superior to the
war generals by rejecting false glory and preferring being a deserter than
being a false hero.

Conclusion

8
 In his remarkable novel Catch-22, Joseph Heller presents the individual
as trapped in a world governed by false ideology and values represented in
the novel by catch-22, where death and annihilation are dominant. Under
these horrible circumstances, people try helplessly to survive and stay alive
as long as possible in this immoral world. Some of them follow selfish,
vicious, and immoral ways to survive such as colonel Cathcart and Milo
Minderbinder who survive at the cost of the lives of the soldiers. Though
they survive, they are morally dead. Yossarian, however, tries to survive by
adopting madness so that he will not be asked to fly extra missions. He
realizes the corruption and inhumanity of the system after Snowden's
death, a system which might take his life (the military) or sacrifice him for
profit (Milo Minderbinder). Consequently, he resolves to fly to neutral
Sweden and survive morally. Unlike Cathcart and Milo Minderbinder,
Yossarian determines to remain morally alive and take responsibility for his
life in a totally irresponsible world.

Thus, Heller is talented enough to depict Pianosa as a microcosm for

many of the microcosmic evils of our time. In addition, the situation he
describes in Catch-22 is more than an indictment of war; rather, it is an
expression of " completely inhumane exploitation of the individual for…
self-serving ends."25 What he wrote decades ago is now getting complicated
in our present situation in which we live and hope to survive morally.

Notes
1
Robert Merrill, "The Structure and Meaning of Catch-22,"Studies in
American Fiction, Vol.14, NO.2, (Autumn,1986), 3.

9
 2
Joseph Heller, Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here, (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf,1998),212.

3
Sam Merrill, "Playboy Interview: Joseph Heller," Playboy, Vol.22. No.6,
(June, 1975),.68.

4
Tonny Tanner, City of Words: American Fiction 1950-1970, ( London:
Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1971) ,72.

5
Berruete Rodriguez, " From Horror to Humour: Tracing Parody in Joseph
Heller's Catch-22," Philologia Hispalensis, (1999), Vol.13, 38.

6
For this and all other subsequent references to the text see Heller and
Jacobson, Catch-22, (New York: Longman, 1993).120.

7
Donald Meltzer, The Clausrun:An Investigation of Claustrophic
Phenomena, ( SrathTay Clunie, 1992), as quoted in Robert M. Young, " Deadly
Unconscious Logics in Joseph Heller's Catch-22," 1.

8
Robert M. Young, " Deadly Unconscious Logics in Joseph Heller's
Catch-22," http://www.human-nature.com/rmyoung/papers/heller.html,2014, P.1.

9
Robert Brustein, The Logic of Survival in a Lunatic World, (The New
Republic On Line, 2001), 2.. http://www.powells.com/review/2001_05_31

10
Ibid.3

11
Ibid.,

12
young,2.

10
 13
Kathie A. Vosevich, "An Analysis of Catch-22," Twentieth Century
Literary Criticism, Vol. 131, ed., Linda Pavlovski, (Farmington Hills, Mich: The
Gale Group, 2003),3.

14
John W. Aldridge, "The Loony Horror of it All- Catch-22, " Book Review
Desk, Vol.7, No. 3( October, 1986),2.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/02/15/home/heller-loony.html

15
Anita Neziri, "The Impact of Joseph Heller Post- Modernist Features in
the Recent Scientific Studies," Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, Vol.4,
No.1, ( January, 2003), 526.

16
Brustein,3.

17
Berruete Rodriguez, " From Horror to Humour: Tracing Parody in
Joseph Heller's Catch-22," Philologia Hispalensis, (1999), Vol.13, 41.

18
Vosevich, 3.

19
Michael C. Scoggins, "Joseph Heller Combat Experience," War,
Literature and the Arts: An International Journal of the Humanities 15 Seed,
David, The Fiction of Joseph Heller, (New York:St. Martin's Press,1989), 216.

20
Brustein

21
Ibid.

22
Rodreguez, 43.

23
Neziri, 526.

24
Rodreguez, 40.

25
A. Hifler, American Fiction Since 1940, ( New York: Longman, 1992),
114.

11
 References

Aldridge, JohnW. "The Loony Horror of it All- Catch-22 Turns25"

Book Review Desk, Vol.7, No. 3( October,1986).

http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/02/15/home/heller-loony.html

Brustein, Robert. The Logic of Survival in a Lunatic World. New

Republic Online. 2001. http://www.powells.com/review/2001_05_31

Heller, Joseph. Catch-22. New York: Longman, 1993.

--------------------. Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here.

Hifler, A. American Fiction Since 1940. (New York: Longman), 1992.

Meltzer, Donald. The Claustrum: An Investigation of Claustrophic

Phenomena. Strath Tay: Clunie,1992.

Merrill, Robert. " The Structure and Meaning of Catch-22," Studies in

American Fiction. Vol.14, No.2(Autumn, 1986).

Merrill, Sam. "Playboy Interview: Joseph Heller," Playboy, Vol.22. No.6,

(June, 1975).

Neziri, Anita. "The Impact of Joseph Heller Post- Modernist Features in

the Recent Scientific Studies," Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, Vol.4,
No.1, ( January, 2003).

Rodreguez, Berruete. " From Horror to Humour: Tracing Parody in

Joseph Heller's Catch-22," Philologia Hispalensis, Vol.13 (1999) .

Scoggins, Michael C. "Joseph Heller Combat Experience," War,

Literature and the Arts: An International Journal of the Humanities 15 Seed,
David, The Fiction of Joseph Heller.New York:St. Martin's Press,1989.

Tanner, Tonny. , City of Words: American Fiction 1950-1970. London:

Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1971.

12
 Vosevich, Kathi A. "An Analysis of Catch-22," Twentieth Century
Literary Criticism, Vol. 131, ed., Linda Pavlovski, (Farmington Hills, Mich: The
Gale Group, 2003).

Young, Robert M. , " Deadly Unconscious Logics in Joseph Heller's

Catch-22," http://www.human-nature.com/rmyoung/papers/heller.html.2014.

13