Heller Joseph. Catch-22. New York. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks: 1955.
Reason, Type and Setting: I chose this book because I had heard that it was a classic and that it was very good. It is a war book. But it is unlike many others. It gives war a very humorous, serious, and ironic tone. It takes place overseas on and island called Pianosa during World War II.
Plot: So this book is basically making fun of war. Or more, pointing out its ridiculousness in a humourous manner. There is a character named Yossarian. He is a pilot in the war. Basically everybody in the story, or at least all the pilots just want to go home. They don't care at all about the war. Its almost as if they don't even know that it is going on. All they are focusing on is doing the number of missions needed to be done and going home. But this turns out to be impossible because the higher ups are constantly raising the number of missions so that you can never leave. Yossarian seems to be the only one noticing that there is a war going on. He is always telling people that there is someone out to get him. Which technically was true, lots of people were out to get him. Pretty much everybody that they were fighting. Yossarian is very afraid of being killed, so he spends lots of time in the military hospital claiming he has an injury of some sort to stay safe. This is probably my favorite part of the book. Whenever he is in the hospital is always very funny. He would get the job of censoring letters getting sent out. So when given this job he would sometimes not even bother checking the letter, or sometimes he would blot out every word on the page. It was pretty funny.
Character: Nurse Duckett. Nurse Duckett is a nurse. She is described by Yossarian as prude looking, and stuck up. She is strict looking and isn't very happy. Its funny because Yossarian claims he is attracted to her, but he also says that she isn't very pretty. It was funny because he just sees her more as a woman candidate for someone that he can get with more than anything else. At first she really doesn't like Yossarian, but she becomes his lover in the end. I chose her because there was a really funny scene in the story where Yossarian does something very inappropriate to her that i wont mention. I was interested in her mainly because of that one scene. Well with the plot changing so did Yossarian, and so did her feelings for him.
Evaluation: Yes there were some things that I liked about the novel. When it had funny parts they were very funny. I also liked how stupid it made war out to be. I definitely agree with the way author spins war. It definitely did go slow at some times. It would be hard to get in to sometimes. Also I had a hard time figuring out where the story was going. I would recommend this book to certain people. I probably wouldn't recommend it to republicans I think, people that like war, probably not. But it is still definitely a very smart and funny book that I would recommend to some people.
This book really compares to real life. It is about war, and war is a huge part of our life. It tells us that war is ridiculous and nobody even knows what they are fighting for. Nobody wants to be there. That was/is war. So this of course connects to Iraq and how war is ridiculous. So in that case it is important for people to read to see that perspective of war being ridiculous.
Myself in Yossarians shoes. I could definitely see myself as a person that would do whatever it took to survive. I could definitely see myself faking injuries to keep protected. Maybe not if it was a cause that I really felt was worth dying for. But if I was Yossarian and I didn't think it was a cause worth dying for, I definitely would have acted like him.
Author, Context and Trivia:I really don't know anything about the author at all. I have never heard of any of his writings. I haven't read any world war 2 books other than ones about the holocaust. But I have read some old western type civil war stories that I really liked. I think I enjoyed those more because I was more focused on that type of lifestyle that I have always thought interesting. But in Catch 22 i wasn't really fantasizing about wishing i could have been around 50 years ago.
