Critics often refer to Yossarian as an antihero. By that, they mean that he is a leading character who is unlike — perhaps the opposite of — classic heroes of mythology or legend, such as Homer's Odysseus.
Classic heroes usually are endowed with exceptional physical strength, ability, or natural beauty. Odysseus, for example, was a great warrior blessed by the gods and strengthened, or physically altered, by them when necessary to his best interests. When appropriate, he was made to appear as the most beautiful of men. Such heroes usually belong to a ruling class, are born to greatness, and transcend their peers in courage and devotion to a cause.
War brings out the best in them; they love battle and relish in victory. Some, like Odysseus, are especially wise or cunning; but they do not devote much of their time to contemplation. They are men of action, and their actions are noble. They prefer death to dishonor. This is not Yossarian. Yossarian may be a good friend, a lively companion, even a lovable scamp.
But he is no hero and would not want to be one. In contrast, the captain is not endowed with great strength, ability or natural beauty. He is of common birth and certainly does not believe that the gods are with him.
As a warrior, he would just as soon be a civilian. Yossarian considers concepts like "courage" and "heroism" to be foolhardy at best and deadly in the end. Initially, the only cause he is devoted to is his own survival; he needs to grow and develop as a character before he thinks of others.
He loves women, or at least sex, much more than fighting. Victory, for Yossarian, would be a free ticket home. The Captain can be cunning and clever, but he is not a man of action so much as a man of avoidance. He worries a lot and freely admits to being a coward. Yossarian prefers life over any attempt at glory. Yossarian does grow and change as a character, but he is always an antihero. Early in his military career, while stationed at Lowery Field, Colorado, in , he discovers the joy of malingering and the refuge of the hospital.
He fakes appendicitis, avoiding training as he begins a long, loving relationship with hospital life. A helpful English physician suggests that Yossarian should fake a liver ailment rather than appendicitis, the former being much more difficult to diagnose and treat.
Structurally, the novel opens and closes with hospital scenes. The hospital is Yossarian's home away from home and much more civilized than the war front. People die in hospitals, but they do so with more decorum. Through a series of recollections, flashbacks, and out-of-order storytelling, we discover that Yossarian "once" was brave: he flew two passes over a target to be sure that his bombs landed correctly, even though it cost the lives of several men in his squadron.
But then something happened that cost Yossarian his courage—we'll get to that later. By the time the book begins, Yossarian has become legitimately convinced that people are constantly trying to kill him, and begins to work exclusively in his self-interest.
Still, he does manage to maintain some concern for his fellow men, an unusual trait that makes him the ethical and emotional center of the novel. It's pretty clear that Yossarian is the main character of Catch Apart from the fact that he's in almost every chapter and gets by far the most page space, the novel structures itself around the slow revelation of the single trauma he can't move past.
The narrative's circular progress back and forth through time gives the reader the impression that we can't get past Yossarian's trauma either, an effect that Heller maintains right until the final chapters of the novel.
As a person, Yossarian's origins are unclear; all we know is that he's fighting in an American squadron and that he identifies as Assyrian. At one point his nemesis, Colonel Cathcart, expresses disgust at Yossarian's foreign-sounding name.
Cathcart's bigotry tells us that Yossarian appears to be an outsider, no matter where he might have been born. He's a part of the squadron because many of his fellows respect him for his mischief making, but he has also been excluded from the squadron for his odd, erratic behavior. Heller does, however, give Yossarian plenty of literary ancestors. Yossarian describes himself as "Tarzan, Mandrake, and Flash Gordon. He was Bill Shakespeare. He was miracle ingredient Z" 2. Squadron member Clevinger also calls Yossarian " Raskolnikov ," the name of the protagonist of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment.
See the " Allusions " section for a more detailed list of references, but for now, we'll just leave it at this: Tarzan, Cain, Ulysses, the Flying Dutchman, Lot, even the melancholy and murderous Raskolnikov—all of these are mythic outsiders, men who have lost their homes and live outside of society.
And in the cases of Raskolnikov and Cain, they are exiled because they commit murder, which might clue us in to how Yossarian feels at this point about shedding blood.
The early chapters of Catch 22 critique the self-sacrificing patriotism that Heller believes war inspires in people, especially in young men being sent to the front. Yossarian is the conduit for these critiques: he is paranoid that people are trying to murder him, but whenever he raises his fears in conversation, he is reminded, "They're shooting everybody.
People are actually trying to kill him. Nearly every day. It is a war after all. Yossarian's proof that men are trying to murder him is that "strangers he [doesn't] know [shoot] at him with cannons every time he [flies] up into the air to drop bombs on them" 2. In other words, Yossarian views every attack against his squadron as one against him personally, rather than against the squadron as a whole. In Yossarian's mind, dead is dead, in either case.
Major Sanderson, the local psychiatrist, takes it upon himself to psychoanalyze Yossarian in what turns out to be a pointed attack on Heller's part against the psychiatric profession. Sanderson diagnoses Yossarian with "a morbid aversion to dying. What's more unnatural than not wanting to die is suppressing your survival instincts and throwing yourself willingly into harm's way.
If there's one adjective that gets thrown around more than any other in Catch , it's "crazy. Still, while Yossarian may be a bit odd he does have that habit of wandering around naked , no one else is certifiably sane either. A "Catch" refers to a frustrating type of circular logic, one that repeats throughout the novel. A Catch always turns back in on itself, making it impossible to progress. Doc Daneeka uses this logic to prove that Yossarian can't be discharged from the army on mental health grounds.
Yossarian tries to get sent home through a medical discharge by pointing out that everyone in the squadron thinks he's crazy. Doc Daneeka notes:. There [is] only one catch and that [is] Catch, which specifie[s] that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that [are] real and immediate [is] the process of a rational mind.
In other words, if you're crazy enough to ask to leave the army, that's proof that you're too sane to be allowed to go. But, Doc Daneeka points out, it's also part of the rule that you can't be discharged on the grounds of insanity unless you ask.
The thing that gets to Yossarian is not just that he is trapped into doing a crazy number of missions for the military, but also that no one else around him seems to recognize the absurdity of his situation. This point is especially clear when Yossarian discovers that Nately's prostitute and her kid sister have both been turned out of their home onto the street.
When Yossarian demands to know what right the soldiers and police had to kick them out, an old woman replies, "Catch says they have a right to do anything we can't stop them from doing" This is the real logic of Catch it's a name given to any policy that benefits people in power.
There's no escape from it because those with authority can compel you to obey, no matter how ridiculous the rule is. Yossarian's process of discovery, from the moment he first hears one definition of Catch 5. Yossarian's astonishment at each new form of Catch reminds us that this is the driving force of the novel.
We start to see a Catch as a sometimes humorous, sometimes brutal revelation that bureaucracy and government can become a way to trap the individual. Yossarian loves the ladies. This novel has more references to sex than anything else we read in high school except maybe Shakespeare.
Yossarian's always visiting prostitutes or sleeping with local girls in the grass. His relationship with Nurse Duckett is entirely physical, and contains some of the few descriptions of Yossarian's body that we see in the novel apparently, he has bronzed skin and a "wide, long, sinewy back" [ Yossarian resented this very much, but he couldn't do anything about it because a bureaucratic trap, known as catch, said that the men did not have the right to go home after they completed forty missions the number of missions the Army demands they fly because they had to obey their commanding officers.
Yossarian was controlled by the higher authority like the doctors restrained Joe. The whole novel was basically about how Yossarian tried to fight catch Yossarian can be seen as an anti-hero. Many of his actions could be considered immoral or cowardly. For example, in the hospital, he forged and tampered with letters he censored. Whenever he was overwhelmed by the horrors of war and by memories of his friends' deaths, he created symptoms that got him admitted to hospitals.
He also made repeated attempts to be judged as certifiably insane so that he could be discharged. In the end, Yossarian deserted the Army and fled to Sweden, the only place he knew to be safe and sane.
However, Yossarian also possessed traits we would expect to find in a hero. He was intelligent. For example, he knew enough about world literature to identify himself with heroic loners from all kinds of classics. He had few illusions, unlike Pip and Henry. For example, in cadet training, Clevinger thought Lieutenant Scheisskopf really wanted suggestions, but Yossarian knew Scheisskopf didn't mean it. He was respected, admired, and liked by others.
For example, Dobbs would not carry out his plot to kill Colonel Cathcart unless Yossarian approved. Milo admired Yossarian and asked him for business advice. The chaplain also liked Yossarian enough no to speak up when he recognized a "Washington Irving" forgery as Yossarian's.
In many ways, Yossarian was also a very moral person. For example, he turned down the hero deal his irritated commanding officers offered to send him home as a hero if he would praise them publicly. He did not sleep with a woman unless he was in love with her, unlike Odysseus who was unfaithful to his wife in order to save him and his men.
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