Blog post no. 3: Paradox and Morality

The novel, Catch-22 is chock-full of paradox and irony. The namesake of the book, Catch-22 itself is a paradoxical concept. The principle rule of Catch-22 is that 'requesting to be prevented from flying more combat missions because of questionable sanity, is proof that one is sane enough for combat'. First introduced by Doc Daneeka, this plagues every one of the airmen in Yossarian's squadron. After encountering about three-hundred thousand, I started to wonder why they're all included. Nothing, after all is written for no reason.

After looking back at the paradoxes, I started to trace them. I realized that they almost all occur exclusively at the hands of the military. For instance, airmen only have to fly 35 combat missions to finish one tour of duty, however, Colonel Cathcart keeps raising the number of missions over and over. Because Colonel Cathcart is a very senior commanding officer, all of the airmen must follow his orders. Like this instance, the paradoxes always cause grief, and don't seem to ever benefit anybody. They hardly even benefit the army itself. I think that Joseph Heller is trying to paint the army as a bunch of idiots.

In the book, one of the over-reaching themes has been morality. Central to this theme is Yossarian's own struggle with morality. The novel opens with him ducking responsibility any way that he can, he fakes illness, signs a fake name on official documents, and turns around during missions for the smallest of reasons. However, as his friends start to die all around him and he starts to realize that life is very frail, he starts to mature more, and he starts struggling with the concept of altruism against self-interest.

As he spends more time in cities that he's bombed, and sees the rampant destruction all around him, he begins to realize that he's bombing innocent people for the benefit of his superiors. While he's struggling with this concept, one of his friends, Aarfy sees him and starts bragging about how he just raped and murdered a woman. Yossarian hears this and is horrified that this is the type of company that he's been keeping. He continues to struggle with this, and it comes to a head with his full recollection of Snowden's death. Snowden dies in the back of Yossarians plane in a bomb run over Avignon. The nature of his death and how 'visible' it was mad Yossarian start realizing that humans are very fragile creatures.