I first encountered Catch-22 while on duty in Vietnam. A college friend “without-a-clue” (actually probably my best friend in life though I haven’t seen him for several years) sent it to me because he found it both enlightening and funny. Unfortunately, I found it neither. Caught in the middle of my own catch-22, I had no desire to truly see my situation. After reading the first fifty pages, I discarded the book and turned to the schmaltzy writings of some Muslim mystic-poet long since forgotten. What I needed in Vietnam wasn’t a dose of reality but rather pure escapist literature that allowed me to avoid looking at the harsh reality of a badly-fought war fought for, at best, questionable reasons.

It wasn’t until years later that I again encountered this novel on the reading list for my Master’s Degree Program and, though it wasn’t covered in a course, it was required reading for the written and oral exams. Luckily I had put enough distance between Vietnam and myself that I could look at the novel with a new perspective, and it became one of my favorite 20th century novels. Later, I chose to teach it in my Honors American Studies class as representative of a “modern classic,” and as my sole attempt to deal with the effects Vietnam had had on our country.

That said, it’s obviously not an easy novel to read. Some people are put off by its lack of a straightforward, narrative. This lack of narrative structure isn’t made any easier by the misleading titles that suggest each chapter is a devoted to a particular character, when in reality the character may not appear until the very end of the chapter and turn out to be merely a minor part of the chapter bearing their name, only to become a major character in a later chapter bearing the name of an entirely different character.

Anyone who has made it through Joyce or Faulkner, though, should find Heller’s novel relatively easy to follow. In fact, it seems to me that Hellers’ method of telling a story is probably more “realistic” than the common literary technique of merely retelling a person’s whole life directly. This, not straightforward narrative, is how we learn about people in real life, as bloggers well know. Most of us are introduced to people indirectly, either through comments made on a site visited by both or through references made on another site. Even when do read a blogger’s site we learn very little about them directly. Instead, we begin to understand them little by little as they reveal themselves through their commentary on other issues. Readers who are willing to trust this kind of self-revelation will find that Catch 22 is a very perceptive novel that isn’t all that difficult to follow.

Some readers may find its strange mixture of humor and harsh reality both confusing and repulsive. I must admit, that I found the movie version a bit more violent than I liked. That violence is also in the novel, but for those like myself who lack imagination, the violence is mitigated by the words themselves. It’s one thing to visually experience violence, something quite different to read about it. In this novel, words are a much-needed mitigating factor.

I suspect it also helps if you appreciate “military humor,” that dark, ironic sense of humor that makes it possible to get through the impossible. I found it embarassing to read the book while students read it because they were always startled when I would break out laughing. Unfortunately, they seldom laughed while reading it, though I did have a few break into tears while reading it. Those readers old enough to fondly remember the series Get Smart , or so lacking a life that they’ve followed it in re-runs, will appreciate the humor in this novel if they found lines like “Would you believe”" both funny and apt. This kind of humor makes it possible to laugh when you really want to cry out in rage or despair. This sense of humor is so ingrained in me that, as a hiking friend noted, I resort to such humor when I find myself in dire straights, facing undesirable alternatives.

I doubt that many patriotic supporters of the Great SUV-Wars will appreciate Heller’s humor, though. Heller is a true radical, one who sees with laser-like vision through the patently false patriotism that demands the ultimate sacrifice for some while generously rewarding those willing to cash in on other people’s idealism.

If you’re confused at the end of Chapter 5, don’t despair because there are so many loose ends in these chapters that no one could possibly understand them until later in the book. In fact, Heller seems to want readers to question “reality.” Unlike Yossarian, we aren’t living in the hospital; we’re part of the same insane world that threatens Yossarian.

Although Yossarian may appear to be insane, he begins to state his case when he thinks:

Insanity is contagious. This is the only sane ward in the whole hospital. Everybody is crazy but us. This is probably the only sane ward in the whole world, for that matter.

Virtually everything in the first five chapters seems devoted to proving this statement, and it’s not easy to prove because everything we’ve been taught by society would seem to argue to the contrary.

For instance, on first acquaintance most of us would probably like Appleby:

Everything Appleby did, he did well. Appleby was a fair-haired boy from Iowa who believed in God, Motherhood and the American Way of Life, without ever thinking about any of them, and everybody who knew him liked him.

After all, what’s not to believe in? When Yossarian growls “I hate the son of a bitch,” there seems to be little reason to agree with Yossarian. It seems like little more than sour grapes on Yossarian’s part.

Yossarian certainly doesn’t fit the model of the ideal airman. Unfortunately, I suspect I would have preferred to have Havermeyer in my unit in Vietnam than Yossarian. After all:

Havermeyer was a lead bombardier who never missed. Yossarian was a lead bombardier who had been demoted because he no longer gave a damn whether he missed or not. He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt, and his only mission each time he went up was to come down alive.

Who wouldn’t want a man who actually completes his mission over one who only worried about staying alive. That sounds more like the definition of a coward than a hero. In fact, it’s probably not until we discover Havermeyer shooting mice in the middle of the night that we begin to have our doubts:

Havermeyer had grown very proficient at shooting field mice at night with the gun he had stolen from the dead man in Yossarian’s tent. His bait was a bar of candy and he would presight in the darkness as he sat waiting for the nibble with a finger of his other band inside a loop of the line he had run from the frame of his mosquito net to the chain of the unfrosted light bulb overhead. The line was taut as a banjo string, and the merest tug would snap it on and blind the shivering quarry in a blaze of light. Havermeyer would chortle exultantly as he watched the tiny mammal freeze and roll its terrified eyes about in frantic search of the intruder. Havermeyer would wait until the eyes fell upon his own and then he laughed aloud and pulled the trigger at the same time, showering the rank, furry body all over the tent with a reverberating crash and dispatching its soul back to his or her Creator.

Now I’m not saying that this isn’t precisely the kind of man I wanted in combat with me, but there’s obviously also something severely twisted about Havermeyer. He’s such an efficient killing machine that he’s lost touch with his own humanity.

Unfortunately, Havermeyer isn’t the only thing twisted beyond recognition by war. Regulations supposedly written to bring order and justice to the military have become equally twisted:

“Sure there’s a catch,” Doc Daneeka replied. “Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn’t really crazy.” 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. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and he had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.

I’m sure most soldiers who have fought in a war would identify with this concept, though I’m assuming it never really existed. Most of us didn’t want to fight, knew that it was “crazy” to charge a gun position, knew it was crazy to crawl down a booby-trapped tunnel, but still didn’t feel that we had any choice. Our own ideas of what it meant to “be a man” created our dilemmas. We were damned if we did, and damned if we didn’t. We had created a Catch-22 in our own minds. Of course, it’s one thing to create your own Catch-22 and something very different for your government to create one, which is what it makes it so insidious here, especially when the doctor, the symbol of healing, is the one going along with it.

Sometimes I think Catch-22 is the intellectual’s equivalent of Married With Children because no one seems sacred to Heller. No one avoids the harsh exposure of his brillian wit, including the literary intellectuals who are most likely to love his work.

It is, of course, the Clevinger’s of the world who are most likely responsible for rating Catch-22one of the 10 greatest novels of all time. He’s precisely the kind of intellectual reader who would most likely appreciate this kind of complex novel. Success be damned, Heller skewers the Clevingers of the world just like he does virtually everyone else:

Everyone agreed that Clevinger was certain to go far in the academic world. In short, Clevinger was one of those people with lots of intelligence and no brains, and everyone knew it except those who soon found it out.

Fortunately, Heller saves his real barbs for Lieutenant Scheisskopf, that “shit head,” and that’s more fun since few people could take parades as seriously as he does. Anyone who’s ever taken R.O.T.C. probably hates parades almost as much as I do. As if R.O.T.C. wasn’t bad enough, we used to hold parades nearly every Saturday while I was stationed at Fort Irwin, California. Few things seemed more ridiculous than spit polishing boots in order to march through sandy fields and stand at parade rest for hours in 110 degree temperatures in order to present a combat medal to a cook who had served in Vietnam. But we couldn’t hit the road to L.A. until we’d had our Saturday parade.

Unfortunately, there really were people as anal as Lt Scheisskopf in the Army. I know, because Captain “Rush-Rush” once stood me at parade rest in his office for four hours because my belt buckle had scratches on it and he was worried that the troops we were training to go to Vietnam would lack discipline if we officers didn’t set a good example. Never mind that I got those scratches because I was constantly crawling in and out of tanks and mortar tracks trying to make sure my platoon knew those vehicles from top to bottom. I would have had to buy a new belt buckle each morning or sit in office headquarters like he did in order to have avoided those scratches. Somehow it never occurred to me that the Viet Cong would be less apt to kill me if my belt buckle were shiny, though of course by the time we got Vietnam we didn’t have brass belt buckles at all.

It was inevitable that someone who thought as much as Clevinger did would inevitably end up at odds with someone as dumb and as rigid as Lieutenant Scheisskopf:

Clevinger had a mind and Lieutenant Scheisskopf had noticed that people with minds tended to get pretty smart at times. Such men were dangerous, and even the new cadet officers whom Clevinger had helped into office were eager to give damning testimony against him. The case against Clevinger was open and shut. The only thing missing was something to charge him with.

Unfortunately, the last thing you want in the army is a “smart” ass who thinks for himself. If you’re not careful everyone would start thinking for himself or herself, and there’s never been room in a combat unit for people who want to think for themselves.

Of course, Scheisskopf’s capture of the parade pennant symbolizes the triumph of mindless conformity in the military:

And to an audience stilled with awe, he distributed certified photostatic copies of the obscure regulation on which he had built his unforgettable triumph. This was Lieutenant Scheisskopf’s finest hour. He won the parade, of course, hands down, obtaining permanent possession of the red pennant and ending the Sunday parades altogether, since good red pennants were as hard to come by in wartime as good copper wire. Lieutenant Scheisskopf was made First Lieutenant on the spot and began his rapid rise through the ranks. There were few who did not hail him as a true military genius for his important discovery.

It’s not enough for Heller to merely have Lieutenant Scheisskopf win because of his obsession with parades; he has to win on the smallest of technicalities, the kind of technicality that only an obsessed person would ever find. Nor is it entirely irrelevant that this “began his rapid rise through the ranks.”

In the end the conflict can end only one way for there is no way a thinking man can stand up to the mindless conformity required in the army:

Clevinger was guilty, of course, or he would not have been accused, and since the only way to prove it was to find him guilty, it was their patriotic duty to do so. He was sentenced to walk fifty-seven punishment tours.

Yossarian had done his best to warn him the night before. “You haven’t got a chance, kid,” he told him glumly. “They hate Jews.” “But I’m not Jewish,” answered Clevinger “It will make no difference,” Yossarian promised, and Yossarian was right. “They’re after everybody.”

That last line is prophetic, as is this confrontation between those who would dare to think for themselves and the mindless conformity that is demanded by those in charge.

In some ways Heller’s long digression on Major Major’s life seems to interrupt the development of the novel, but, in fact, it effectively shows that “Catch-22″ is not limited to military life. Although Major Major is certainly a co-conspirator in the Col. Cathcart’s scheme to keep his pilots flying missions at all cost, Major Major seems to be such a willing victim because he has been a victim his whole life:

Major Major had been born too late and too mediocre. Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. With Major Major it had been all three. Even among men lacking all distinction he inevitably stood out as a man lacking more distinction than all the rest, and people who met him were always impressed by how unimpressive he was.

From the very beginning, life seemed to conspire to make Major Major a victim, beginning with a self-centered, hypocritical father whose “sense-of-humor” doomed him to be the butt of others:

Major Major’s father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea of a good joke was to lie about his age. He was a long-limbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism. He advocated thrift and hard work and disapproved of loose women who turned him down. His speciality was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any.

(My students could never quite figure out why I had trouble reading this passage without at least snickering, but that’s probably because they didn’t have a father-in-law who earned considerable subsidies for raising wheat to sell to Japan, but who constantly harped against the clients his daughter and I served as welfare workers.)

The father’s greatest joke, of course, is the one played on his wife and his son. The fact that it was a particularly brutal one seemed to give him great satisfaction. Heller doesn’t have to fill in the rest of the details of Major’s childhood for the reader to imagine what his childhood must have been like. While I pray it was an exaggeration that his classmates would no longer play with him when they learned that he wasn’t really who he said he was, it seems all too believable that the shock and feelings of loss of identity would isolate him:

Nobody would have anything to do with him. He began to drop things and to trip. He had a shy and hopeful manner in each new contact, and he was always disappointed. Because he needed a friend so desperately, he never found one.

To my mind this is single most frightening example of Catch-22 in the entire book, because, as a teacher and parent, I have seen too many children devastated by being shunned by their peers. I even heard misguided parents tell their children not to play with another child because he was “weird.” It’s hard to imagine a better example of a self-fulfilling prophesy, the moral equivalent of a parent constantly telling their child they’re “no good.”

The harder he tried to overcome his feelings of inadequacy and gain favor with adults, the more they seemed to dislike him:

He never once took the name of the Lord his God in vain, committed adultery or coveted his neighbor’s ass. In fact, he loved his neighbor and never even bore false witness against him. Major Major’s elders disliked him because he was such a flagrant nonconformist.

Ever noticed it’s not “cool” to be “square?” Of course, it seems a bit strange that someone who does what he’s been taught is right can somehow be considered “square.” Reminds me a little of my unfortunate friend Lieutenant Maiden who didn’t drink and who was often ridiculed by the other 2nd lieutenants who somehow felt the truest test of manhood was to spend the night drinking and still be able to get up in the morning and lead PT with a hangover. I thought it was stupid to make fun of him, but I did my best to keep up with the drinking and never missed my turn in leading PT, no matter how bad I felt.

Little surprise, then, that Major Major finally discovers that lying is better than telling the truth:

Major Major had lied, and it was good. He was not really surprised that it was good, for he had observed that people who did lie were, on the whole, more resourceful and ambitious and successful than people who did not lie. Had he told the truth to the second C.I.D. man, he would have found himself in trouble. Instead he had lied, and he was free to continue his work.

It makes little sense to really expect people to tell the truth when society constantly rewards those who are less than truthful. If truth is really so highly valued, after all, why would we pay millions of dollars to those who produce those most skillful lies known as commercials, those sanctified lies that drive the economy. For that matter, why do we inevitably seem to elect leaders who can lie better than their opponents, and then somehow expect them to tell the truth after they’re elected?

Of course, after he has learned to lie, it’s a small step for this most honest of men to give in to greed and all the benefits awaiting those who take advantage of their position and power. Thus, though at first Major Major tells Milo Minderbinder that he wants to be served the same things his men were served, he’s seduced by the benefits of his office:

For dinner that night Milo served him broiled Maine lobster with excellent Roquefort salad and two frozen eclairs. Major Major was annoyed. If he sent it back, though, it would only go to waste or to somebody else, and Major Major had a weakness for broiled lobster. He ate with a guilty conscience. The next day for lunch there was terrapin Maryland with a whole quart of Dom Perignon 1937, and Major Major gulped it down without a thought.

Little wonder, then, at the end of the chapter that Major Major tells Yossarian, “I’m sorry” but there’s nothing I can do” when Yossarian asks for Major Major’s help in getting out of flying any more of Cathcart’s missions.