The Time and its Significance in Catch 22 - Research Paper Example

The Concept of Time in Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 The novel Catch 22 by Joseph Heller is widely recognised as one of the most significant novels of the 20th century and yet in many ways it is a difficult book to read and to appreciate. This paper will examine the concept of time in the novel, firstly from the point of view of the novel’s structure, and then secondly in terms of the idea of time as it is presented in the narrative. After that some conclusions will be drawn regarding Heller’s view of time and its significance in mid-twentieth century American culture. The novel starts off like a conventional comic novel, with Yossarian in bed in hospital and plotting how to avoid going back to combat duty. He is portrayed subverting the censoring procedure with ludicrous amendments to the airmens’ letters home and the tone is light, ironic and inventive. The narrator explains why Yossarian is doing this “To break the monotony he invented games” (Heller, p. 16) and then goes on to give the reader a hint that this book is not going to be just a simple funny narrative, but in fact quite a demanding intellectual exercise. Yossarian deletes parts of speech like modifiers and adverbs and the narrator says “That erected more dynamic intralinear tensions, he felt, and in just about every case left a message far more universal” (Heller, p.16). Reading between the lines, it is clear that Heller here is warning the reader that the story which follows will not have all the linking aids that people normally expect, but that a text with random gaps will require quite a lot of effort in “joining the dots” to make sense of it. The phrase “dynamic intralinear tensions” is chosen specifically because Heller proceeds now to construct a novel with exactly this quality. If the reader is confused by the terminology, and by the resulting literary work, at least he should not be confused by the intention: it is to create more tension than a standard linear narrative, and to make the message more universal. The effect of the linguistic terminology is funny in the book, because it is applied to such a comic context, but the serious point is nevertheless still true. As the novel progresses this playfulness with the reader continues. After a fairly standard narrative of two chapters, the story, if it can be called a story, shifts back in time. The location changes from the island of Pianosa in the Mediterranean to Rome. This sudden switching, with no warning and little in the way of explicit signposting, is a very frequent occurrence in the book. Peel maintains that the disjointed, non-chronological structure is designed to fulfil two purposes, namely “to juxtapose two scenes in order to show their relevance to one another” and also to “create a graduated series of events … each more sinister than the one before” (Peek, 1975, p. 10). From this it follows that the novel is put together thematically, so that similar ideas can be presented together and also cumulatively, and then these ideas are built upon and magnified throughout the course of the novel. This approach has a number of disadvantages for the reader and the major one is the sense of disorientation that arises from not having the usual consecutive storyline that people have come to accept in the novel format. It is quite usual to have flashbacks and flash forwards, or even to have different chapters focussing on, or written from the viewpoint of, different characters, but it is unusual to have a text which so often jumps from person to person and from past to present to future and back again. This makes it very difficult to discern plot and any character development in the usual sense of these words. To make the issue even more complicated, the same event can be narrated several times, so that the reader is never quite sure what the correct linear order of events actually was. The gruesome death of Snowden, for example, is repeated again and again and it is almost like the obsessive thinking round and round in circles that is experienced immediately after people experience a traumatic event. It is obsessive, as if in each telling there is another attempt to make sense of the scene, but in fact each time that the event is raised, it only serves to underline the horror and extend the shock of it. Towards the end of the novel, the significance of Snowden’s event becomes clear when Yossarian reflects “It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden’s secret” (Heller, p. 440). This is one of the most profound statements in the book. The mention of reading a message in entrails refers to ancient soothsayers who sacrificed animals to their gods and then closely analysed the entrails, believing that the entrails contained omens that could foretell the future or give guidance on how to act. Yossarian sees a message, but it is the bleak and hopeless message that man is a fragile creature, destined to become a lifeless hideous mess of matter. This little scene is important because it links the book’s refusal to place things in a chronological order with the over-arching theme of the utter futility and horror of death. All of the deaths which have been narrated in the book so far are encapsulated in this horrific image of an airman slumped in a heap of matter. In a sense it doesn’t matter which corpse the book is describing, or at what point in the chronology it happens. The end effect is the same, because all will die and the pattern will be repeated to infinity. The humour in the book is also firmly linked to its repetitive structure. The illogical practices of military life are repeatedly described and ridiculed by the characters in the book. The novel’s title, for example, refers to the nonsensical premises that underpin military life in wartime. Men should operate safety procedures to the letter, and doctors should carry out their life saving profession so that the airmen are all the better equipped to go out and get themselves killed. In particular all the bureaucratic procedures are depicted as a Kafkaesque meandering round a meaningless world where people are held accountable for things they do not understand and can never accomplish. As the novel proceeds, it becomes clear that more and more of the characters actually die. Because there is no chronology, this is not quite evident at the beginning, but by the end of the book almost all of the main characters are dead. The humour is maintained but it sounds more and more desperate in the face of more and more deaths. The characters are so engaging, however, and the running gags so skilfully told, that the reader develops a certain hardness, a little like medical students, perhaps, who cover up their fear and shock with black jokes. Merrill points out that the repetition of humorous elements is a deliberate ploy to draw the reader into this chaotic world and then bring him or her up short when he says that Heller “wanted to make his crucial point about widespread complicity in the regimented business society. He wanted people to laugh and then look back with horror at what they were laughing at.” (Merrill, p.151). It is a paradox this novel depends on its humor to achieve its hard-hitting anti-war message. Other famous anti war novels like Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front” rely more on reason and pathos using a traditional storytelling mode. The ordinariness of the characters makes the extraordinariness of the wartime situation all the more obvious . Heller’s book, on the other hand, prefers absurdity, exaggeration and comic caricature in a chaotic jumble to highlight the senselessness of war. Pathos is there, for example in the character of the chaplain who suffers from his loss of faith and the intolerable burden of being expected to offer comfort in a situation beyond any kind of help. He represents a force of order and morality, a potential source of meaning in the non-material world, but predictably in a book which turns everything upside down, he has nothing to offer but hopelessness and despair. Another repeated little reflection on the nature of time is indicated by Yossarion’s constant desire to complete the amount of missions that would qualify him for a return to his homeland. This is an entirely natural desire that his wartime story should move in a forward direction and come to its pre-ordained end. Unfortunately, however, the goalposts are shifted again and again so that each time he approaches the required number of missions, he finds that there is a still higher target to reach. The normal rules of time do not apply in this book and any attempt to quantify the passage of time, or measure it, record it or predict it, is firmly denied. There is only one relevant consideration, and that is to reinterpret the war in terms of a simple clinging to life: "‘The enemy,’ retorted Yossarian with weighted precision, ‘is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on, and that includes Colonel Cathcart. And don't you forget that, because the longer you remember it, the longer you might live.’" (Heller, p. 124). This insight highlights the absurd abuse of power that exists not only in the horrors of war itself, but in the nitpicking Colonel who is more concerned about his troops operating more efficiently, obeying mindless orders, and carrying out their orders within the number of seconds than about whether his troops are to live or die. In the light of all this structural and thematic playing with the notion of time, it is interesting to note that Heller chooses to end the novel with Yossarion’s decision to desert from the military. If there is no way to move forward in this world of endless circles and ever receding goals, then Yossarion sees desertion, and the inevitable loss of liberty and very likely life itself as the only meaningful choice of action. Resisting the bureaucracy and standing up to the absurd regulations is this is only way to stop the clock, to prove that escape from the endless cycle of destruction is possible. What Yossarion has learnt from the horrors of war, is that death is inevitable and honor an empty bauble dangled before the airmen to persuade them that there is meaning in their sacrifice. Since time is irrelevant in an absurd, post-modern world, and death is inevitable, Yossarion reasons that he must make his own meaning by imposing upon the world his own act of defiance. In conclusion, then, we must assume that both the avoidance of linear narrative and the discussion of the role of time in Catch 22 are important parts of the novel’s message. In an interview of 1981 with the Rolling Stone Magazine, Heller revealed just how crucial he regarded these issues saying “Remove the spirit, the literary personality of Catch 22 and put the events in chronological order, and you’ll find an uneventful story about a bombardier and a colonel who wants his men to fly more missions than anyone else. My interest was more on the Cold War and the Korean War”. (Flippo, p. 232) It seems then, that the deliberate literary artifice and the ironic persona of Yossarion draw are intended to distance the reader from a set of specific events affecting these particular characters in that particular World War. The effect that Heller is seeking is to focus instead on the continuing absurdity of a military machine that drives young men to sacrifice their sanity and their lives for what amounts to mindless, bureaucratic profiteering and opportunism in heroic guise. Bibliography Flippo, Chet. “Checking in with Joseph Heller” Rolling Stone 16th April 1981, pp. 50- 60 reprinted in Sorkin, Conversations with Joseph Heller. University Press of Mississippi. 1993, pp. 224-234. Heller, Joseph. Catch 22. New York: Simon and Shuster, 1955, reprint 1996. Merrill, Robert. “The Structure and Meaning of Catch-22” Studies in American Fiction, 14/2 (1986), pp. 139-152. Peek, C.A. Heller’s Catch 22- Cliffs Notes. New York: Hungry Minds Inc., 1975. Sorkin, Adam J. Conversations with Joseph Heller. University Press of Mississipi, 1993. Read More