Question 1:

Read the following quotation. Indicate whether you agree, disagree, or qualify the
statement. Use examples from what you have read, personal experiences, and
personal knowledge to support your argument.
"It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong." (Voltaire)
Remember:
 Yossarian's hazy memory of the threatening man who keeps saying he's got
Yossarian's "pal."

 Yossarian's final negotiation with Colonels Cathcart and Korn, in which he gets
offered a free trip home, with a parade, if he will simply just pretend to like the two of
them.

 Doc Daneeka's official "death," and the tragic aftermath for him -- and for his wife.

 The brutality that Aarfy shows to the girl that he murdered -- and the fact that the
MP's come and arrest Yossarian instead.

 The dangers of Milo's bombing of the squadron because he contracted the job out with
the Germans as part of his syndicate.

The key in your writing is to show incidences of the government being wrong (morally or
practically) in a situation, resulting in danger for those who have not embraced that
wrong as of yet.
You also have to write about your own personal experience, and about other events to
which you have been exposed. The more specific you can be, and the more closely you
can relate to the idea of the dangers of dissidence, the better your essay will be.
Question 2:
Princess Elizabeth Absquith Bibesco wrote that "irony is hygiene of the mind." In
other words, irony could be seen as a test of whether or not the mind is prepared to
interpret it correctly.
Choose a character from Catch-22 who finds an experience of irony to be a mentally
cleansing situation. Write an essay in which you examine that character's experience
with irony and show the various ways the author shows that experience to be a
purifying one.

Remember:

When Yossarian shows up for the war, he is just as gung-ho as the rest of them; flying his
missions and excelling as a lead bombardier for his flight group. It is when he
experiences irony piled upon irony (Snowden blown to bits from the inside, despite the
fact that he was wearing a flak suit and initially looked like he just had a leg wound;
Yossarian having to fight the oddly buoyant Aarfy out of his tunnel to the main body of
the plane; being offered a chance to go home, if he will only turn his back on his
convictions and renounce, in a sense, those same convictions).
By the end of the novel, Yossarian feels as well as he ever has throughout the book. The
difference, of course, is that he is running away from the military hospital so he can row
from Italy to Sweden in a rubber lifeboat.
You will want to write about the ways that paradox is used -- seeming contradictions that
turn out to be actually true. While these contradictions throughout Catch-22 befuddle
Yossarian through the novel, they also bring him clarity in time to attempt his escape at
the end.