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    A Study Guide for Joseph Heller's Catch-22
    A Study Guide for Joseph Heller's Catch-22
    A Study Guide for Joseph Heller's Catch-22
    Ebook57 pages1 hour

    A Study Guide for Joseph Heller's Catch-22

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Joseph Heller's "Catch-22," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 30, 2015
    ISBN9781535820530
    A Study Guide for Joseph Heller's Catch-22

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      A Study Guide for Joseph Heller's Catch-22 - Gale

      5

      Catch-22

      Joseph Heller

      1961

      Introduction

      Set toward the end of World War II in 1944, on an island off the coast of Italy, Joseph Heller's Catch-22 is a satirical antiwar novel. It features black humor, an unusual narrative structure, surrealism (a genre which features strange imagery and events), and a not-so-heroic protagonist who struggles to deal with the insanity of war and concludes that the only sane response to it is not to participate in it. Heller began writing Catch-22 in 1953, and a chapter from the still-in-progress novel was published in an anthology in 1955. The completed novel was published in 1961.

      American army pilot John Yossarian is an antihero, that is, a protagonist lacking some traditionally heroic qualities. He is obsessed with being rotated out of active flight duty. His commander, Colonel Cathcart, keeps raising the number of missions the men in the squadron must fly before they can be rotated out. Consequently, Yossarian is desperate to find another way out of his dilemma. He asks the squadron's doctor, Doc Daneeka, to declare him unfit for duty by reason of insanity. Doc refuses, citing the mysterious Catch-22: if Yossarian asks to be let out of his duties, he must be sane. Only a crazy man would want to continue to fly missions, but the only way Daneeka can ground him, according to Catch-22, is if he asks to be grounded—which would indicate his sanity. The circular reasoning of this catch is the central metaphor for the absurdity of war and the military bureaucracy.

      Yossarian's questions and responses to his situation show that he is indeed a sane man in an insane situation. Heller uses black humor, absurd and even surreal events, and a nonlinear narrative structure in which events are arranged by theme rather than by chronology, to drive home his point that institutions such as the military, big business, government, and religion are corrupt and individuals must find their own responses to this corruption. Heller's questioning of these respected institutions, and of war in general, foreshadowed the social protests and antiwar movements of the late 1960s, and made it one of the most popular and enduring novels of its time.

      Author Biography

      Joseph Heller was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1923 and grew up in Coney Island. This oceanside town had a large population of Russian Jewish immigrants, including Heller's parents, and was known for its amusement park. Heller's biting sense of humor may have been influenced by growing up in this somewhat surrealistic, carnival-like neighborhood.

      After his 1941 high school graduation, Heller worked in an insurance office for a short time. The next year, 1942, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps, and in 1944, the year in which Catch-22 is set, Heller was stationed on the island of Corsica (located in the Mediterranean Sea, off the coasts of France and Italy). There he was a bombardier who flew sixty combat missions, earning an Air Medal and a Presidential Unit citation. After the war ended in 1945, Heller married Shirley Held and went to college, eventually earning a B.A. in English from New York University and an M.A. from Columbia University. He then attended Oxford University in England as a Fulbright Scholar for a year, then moved to Pennsylvania, where he taught English at Pennsylvania State University for two years. Heller then changed careers, working as an advertising copywriter from 1952 to 1961 at such popular magazines as Time, Look, and McCall's. These jobs influenced his 1974 novel Something Happened. While working as a copywriter, Heller wrote short stories and television and film screenplays, and began writing Catch-22.

      The first chapter of Catch-22 was originally published in an anthology in 1955, and the entire work was

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