I dis­cov­ered Joseph Heller’s satir­i­cal nov­el Catch-22 way back in my ear­ly twen­ties and went on to re-read it in that decade at least once, maybe twice. It is placed square­ly on that lit­er­ary pedestal known as “the great Amer­i­can nov­el” and with some jus­ti­fi­ca­tion, since it reg­u­lar­ly tops polls and even the BBC’s Big Read sur­vey in 2003 (the biggest sin­gle test of pub­lic read­ing taste to date) had it ranked num­ber 11 in the UK’s best-loved books. It is a dark­ly humor­ous and absur­dist satire, that exco­ri­ates the illog­i­cal nihilism of war, and it does it mas­ter­ful­ly.

I won’t attempt a plot sum­ma­ry, so let me just briefly frame the sto­ry. The nov­el fol­lows the exploits of the fic­tion­al Amer­i­can 256^th fight­er squadron, sta­tioned on the island of Pianosa in Italy’s Tus­can arch­i­pel­ago, dur­ing the height of World War II. With a huge cast of char­ac­ters and a nar­ra­tive that switch­es view­points and chronol­o­gy on a reg­u­lar basis, Heller cre­ates a deli­cious mix of absur­di­ty and hilar­i­ty.

Chief lunatic in the asy­lum is Cap­tain John Yos­sar­i­an, bomber pilot, whose main ambi­tion in life is to stay alive (“live for­ev­er or die in the attempt”). Yos­sar­i­an doesn’t dis­tin­guish between the “ene­my” and his supe­ri­ors; as far as he’s con­cerned, the ene­my is any­body who’s going to get him killed, no mat­ter which side they’re on, and he con­cocts a series of inge­nious, albeit ulti­mate­ly unsuc­cess­ful, meth­ods for avoid­ing the sui­ci­dal bomb­ing mis­sions. In so doing, the Yos­sar­i­an char­ac­ter acts as the con­science of the sto­ry; his is the voice of rea­son and right­eous anger against the war and the face­less bureau­cra­cy that pulls its strings. It is that Kafkaesque bureau­cra­cy that thwarts his and oth­ers’ attempts to avoid dan­ger­ous sit­u­a­tions, most notably with the infa­mous Catch-22.

A catch-22, of course, is a para­dox­i­cal sit­u­a­tion from which a per­son can­not escape due to its con­tra­dic­to­ry rules. It is per­haps notable that the phrase, coined by Heller, has become part of the lex­i­con; life is indeed full of such sit­u­a­tions (“how do I gain expe­ri­ence in a job if I am always turned down for not hav­ing any expe­ri­ence?”). In the book it is used in a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent for­mu­la­tions to jus­ti­fy some mil­i­tary require­ment or oth­er. Inci­den­tal­ly, Heller’s orig­i­nal title was Catch-18 but for rea­sons of eupho­ny (and the release of anoth­er book, Leon Uris’s Mila 18) it was changed to Catch-22. Here’s an exam­ple of how the catch works.

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which spec­i­fied that a con­cern for one’s 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 had to. Yos­sar­i­an was moved very deeply by the absolute sim­plic­i­ty of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respect­ful whis­tle.

“That’s some catch, that Catch-22,” he observed.

“It’s the best there is,” Doc Danee­ka agreed.”