Analysis of Catch-22 Clauses - Essay Example

Yossarian decided to act like an insane person so that he would be sent to the hospital. Since insane people could not be fit to work as military personnel, he thought that it would be a great exit plan. Catch 22 has some very challenging clauses that force military personnel from doing what they would want to do. In this case, Catch-22 forced Yossarian to act like a mad person to avoid being military personnel. However, he is given a different kind of work of reading and censoring letters from military patients.

It is very challenging for Yossarian to prove to the military that he is insane. This is because the word insane can mean different things to different people. For example, being insane in the military context is different from being insane in the real civilian world. It can even be said that insanity in the military is acceptable, especially because of the way the military laws and regulations define it. However, the military law called catch-22 could not allow him to quit the military job since by knowing that he is insane was proof that he was sane.

Therefore, Yossarian decided to spend the rest of his life in the hospital. His job in the hospital was to read and censor all the letters written by male patients in the hospital. When he was in the hospital, he decided to write letters to all the people he knew, in an effort of trying to show how insane he was. In the first letter, he wrote that he was going on a dangerous mission. The process of censoring the letters was a boring task. To make it interesting, he decided to play games with the letters.

For example, he crossed all the modifiers in all the letters he read on day one. In the following days, he looked for a more interesting and challenging task to do with the letters. He tried all possible changes he could make to the letters including blacking out the whole content of the letter apart from the salutations. As if that was not enough, he began acting on the envelopes. There were times that he even blacked out all the address information on the letters. Sometimes, he was so bored that he did not read the letters at all.

However, he developed a habit of writing the word Washington Irving on every letter that he read. The word Washington Irving brought a lot of trouble in the military because the senior officers became curious about who Washington Irving was. The officers decided to put a C.I.D. officer who was then taken to the hospital as a patient. However, the other patients knew that he was a C.I.D. since he always kept on asking for an officer called Washington or Irving. Although Yossarian did all the crazy things in the letters that he censored, the military did not seem to take note of his actions and force him to go home.

The issue only got to the senior officers when most of them had the name Washington Irving on them. Who was Washington Irving? Washington Irving was an author in America. It is not clear where Yossarian got the idea of signing off the letters as Washington Irving. However, he wrote the name Washington Irving in every letter that he read in an attempt to make himself look insane. He used to black the real names on the letters that he read and wrote Washington Irving or Irving, Washington when he got bored.

Although Washington Irving was an American author and had nothing to do with the military, Yossarian wrote his name on all the letters that he read. In the process, the military seniors believed that Washington Irving was a rogue military personnel. They sent a C.I.D. officer into the hospital to make investigations and know who he was. It is not clear what happened to the C.I.D. officer since the military men in the hospital knew he was a C.I.D. officer (Stafford 142-143).