We’ve all heard the phrase “ Catch-22”, and more than likely, we’re all familiar with what it means in context.īasically, Catch-22 could be paraphrased as “damned if you do, damned if you don’t”… indeed, there are several idioms that have similar meanings, such as “caught between the devil and the deep blue sea” or “between a rock and a hard place”.

…paraphrased as “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” Image source: brokeandbookish Why couldn’t He? … What a colossal, immortal blunderer! When you consider the opportunity and power He had to really do a job, and then look at the stupid, ugly little mess He made of it instead, His sheer incompetence is almost staggering.*** Catch-22 – What is the Meaning of it? Any jukebox manufacturer worth his salt could have done that. Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did he ever create pain? … Oh, He was really being charitable to us when He gave us pain! Why couldn’t He have used a doorbell instead to notify us, or one of His celestial choirs? Or a system of blue-and-red neon tubes right in the middle of each person’s forehead. That’s the kind of God you people talk about-a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. He’s playing or else He’s forgotten all about us. “And don’t tell me God works in mysterious ways,” Yossarian continued, hurtling over her objections. They continue until Yossarian launches into a pagelong denunciation of God that I think is the blasphemous heart of the book: “Be furious you’re going to die,” he counters. “Be bitter you’re not going to stay that way,” he says. (Spoiler alert: His fellow crewman Snowden suffers a horrendous flak wound and literally spills his guts into Yossarian’s hands the incident, recounted at the end of the book, takes place early on in the chronology and may well be what triggered the overt symptoms of rebellion we see in Yossarian throughout.) Even so, there’s no shortage of novels that dwell on the tragedy of mortality.Īmong her responses: “Be thankful you’re healthy.” After all, Yossarian’s much ballyhooed “discovery” of mortality at the end of the novel is not much of a discovery, however “hands on” it may be. Even to regard it, as many critics do, as about “mortality” diminishes its scope.

So where does that leave us? It left me thinking that to regard Catch-22 merely as an anti-war novel is a mistake. What if everyone acted like Yossarian? Well, maybe he’d be a fool not to have done so, but Hitler might well have remained in control of Europe. If you want to admire Catch-22 as an anti-war novel, you can only reasonably do so from a strictly pacifist position. Which means that on strictly moral grounds, Podhoretz may have had a point. Which means there was a lot of significant, potentially disastrous fighting yet to be done and that those bombing runs that Yossarian is shirking-even if they were ordered by preening idiots with no concern for the air crews or the war beyond the opportunity for self-promotion-had significance. Mussolini is still in power in the novel, so its time frame must be 1943. (I’ve just done a new introduction to the 50 th-anniversary edition of William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which sensitized me to the chronology of the war.) There is no mention of Normandy in the novel, the Herman Goering Division is still a force to be reckoned with, even the Italian campaign was not a done deal. And re-examining the book opened the door to a new way of looking at Catch-22, one that saw it as even more profound.įirst the factual background: If you examine the state of the war at the time when the novel is set more closely, you have to concede the war wasn’t “over,” in the sense of having been definitively won.

But after a while, probably after the time I spent writing Explaining Hitler, I began to rethink that defense, and to find it deficient. I was satisfied with that for a while, and I kept on rereading Catch-22 with even more defiant pleasure. The people who defended Heller, Yossarian, and Catch-22 from critiques like Podhoretz’s tended to say, Well, the war was just about all over! Already won! The missions were hardly even necessary the commanders were foolishly and unnecessarily condemning the fliers to death by ordering extra missions.

Catch 22 meaning