I'm only just now over halfway through Catch-22 after having owned a copy for over a year. I realize this makes me kind of a bad person, and I really am sorry. In fairness, I did spend a lot of that time in Ireland, and I read small books because I spent most of that semester living out of a backpack.
But I still feel like I need to apologize to someone for it (Heller? Yossarian? My father?), just because Catch-22 really is that amazing. It might possibly be the funniest book I've ever read while at the same time being one of the saddest.
There are so many incredible parts in Catch-22 that it would take ages to address all of them. The whole Washington Irving debacle hits me as being just so brilliantly hilarious; in fact, I'm pretty sure the exact moment I realized I would enjoy the book was in the first chapter, when Yossarian is in the hospital censoring letters:
To break the monotony he invented games. Death to all modifiers, he declared one day, and out of every letter that passed through his hands went every adverb and every adjective. The next day he made war on articles. He reached a much higher plane of creativity the following day when he blacked out everything in the letters but a, an, and the. That erected more dynamic intralinear tensions, he felt, and in just about every case left a message far more universal.
(Catch-22, pg 8)
What I actually intended to write about in this particular post, amusing and highly relevant censorship jokes aside, was a particular chapter I read just the other night. This chapter deals with the group chaplain having somewhat of a personal crisis. He believes he has seen some sort of divine premonition while presiding over the funeral of a young man named Snowden who was killed in combat. What the chaplain has actually seen, however, is merely Yossarian sitting naked in a tree watching the funeral from a distance. Yossarian is naked because he decided to never wear a uniform again after Snowden was wounded in his plane and bled all over Yossarian while dying. The ending of this chapter is beautiful:
So many things were testing his faith. There was the Bible, of course, but the Bible was a book, and so were Bleak House, Treasure Island, Ethan Frome and The Last of the Mohicans. Did it then seem possible, as he had once overheard Dunbar ask, that the answers to the riddles of creation would be supplied by people too ignorant to understand the mechanics of rainfall? Had Almighty God, in all His infinite wisdom, really been afraid that men six thousand years ago would succeed in building a tower to heaven? Where the devil was heaven? Was it up? Down? There was no up or down in a finite but expanding universe in which even the vast, burning, dazzling, majestic sun was in a state of progressive decay that would eventually destroy the earth too. There were no miracles; prayers went unanswered, and misfortune tramped with equal brutality on the virtuous and the corrupt; and the chaplain, who had conscience and character, would have yielded to reason and relinquished his belief in the God of his fathers [...] had it not been for such successive mystic phenomena as the naked man in the tree at that poor sergeant's funeral weeks before and the cryptic, haunting, encouraging promise of the prophet Flume in the forest only that afternoon: 'Tell them I'll be back when winter comes.'
(Catch-22, pg 354)
Once again we see one of my favorite literary themes, people who have absolutely lost their way in life. And I find it wonderful that the chaplain finds solace not in his faith, not in the Bible, but in the sight of Yossarian sitting naked in a tree watching a funeral and Captain Flume emerging briefly from his self-imposed exile into the woods to ask if Chief White Halfoat has died of pneumonia yet. Perhaps the idea here is that we often take comfort from things that make absolutely no sense to us simply because we can allow ourselves to interpret them in any way that we like. We humans like to find patterns in things that have no matter and create significance where there is none. We give these things meaning because, if we truly believed that everything that happened to us was largely random and meaningless, how could we possibly keep going?
At any rate, Catch-22 is brilliant. And I'll add a brief nod to Cracked.com's Dan O'Brien for mentioning it in his list of "The Funniest Books I've Ever Read" at the end of this column here (5 Reasons It's Impossible to Find Funny Books), just because it made me happy to read that this morning while eating my oatmeal and drinking my tea before I went to my Ethics class and spent fifty minutes debating the ethics of cannibalism.
And I can't talk about Catch-22 without mentioning my absolute favorite part of the book (although what does it say that while flipping around for the exact quote, I ran across the Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade and a bunch of the earlier parts with ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen and thought, "Oh, but these parts are brilliant, I should talk about them too!" I could write a book about this book):
Milo was even more upset by the possibility that someone had poisoned his squadron again, and he came bustling fretfully to Yossarian for assistance.
'Please find out from Corporal Snark if he put laundry soap in the sweet potatoes again,' he requested furtively. 'Corporal Snark trusts you and will tell you the truth if you give him your word you won't tell anyone else. As soon as he tells you, come and tell me.'
'Of course I put laundry soap in the sweet potatoes,' Corporal Snark admitted to Yossarian. 'That's what you asked me to do, isn't it? Laundry soap is the best way.'
'He swears to God he didn't have a thing to do with it,' Yossarian reported back to Milo.
Milo pouted dubiously. 'Dunbar says there is no God.'
(Catch-22, pg 155)
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