Article Title
Joseph Heller's Catch-22 requires a certain mood from the reader. It requires the reader to be open to cynicism, to absurdity, to satire of the most biting variety. Catch-22 requires the reader to laugh at that which is held most sacred.
Fortunately, Heller is able to invoke that mood and convince his readers to suspend disbelief until each pixel is in place and the ending leaves the readers--for at least a moment--convinced that all was exactly as Heller wrote it.
For those of us born post-Vietnam, it can be hard to remember that Heller was writing about the "good war." Yet, it hardly matters what war he's writing about, or even that any war is his setting. He could have told his story with a Southern sewing circle or a science fiction convention. But the setting he chooses makes it accessible to everyone. It also prepares the reader to experience horror. After all, we expect to be horrified at some point in a novel about war. We just don't expect to be horrified at quite what Heller has to reveal to us.
One of my favorite aspects of Catch-22 is the way Heller treats time. This is not a simple chronology of a man's war experiences. Instead, time rotates and with each rotation we come a little closer to the "truth," though we are threatened many times with an eclipse.
Both my husband and I have read this book many times over. As satire it is a masterpiece. For pure absurdity and dark comedy, it has no equals. Ultimately, it is a wonderful book because it paints our society in a way that we might otherwise deny and cheerfully forces questions on us that are worth asking.
