Catch 22

Yossarian had decided to live forever. Or die in the attempt…

Having just survived yet another murderous air raid into occupied France, bombardier Yossarian decides that the enemy isn’t just the Germans. It’s anyone who’s going to get him killed, no matter which side they’re on. If he can just get himself declared insane, he won’t have to fly any more.

Trouble is, he’s the sanest man on the base…

The original novel focused on the lives of a large number of different airmen as they try to survive both the war and the bureaucratic nightmare they find themselves in. Heller’s own stage adaptation brings the focus in more tightly on Yossarian, and as a result a number of popular characters (Orr, Dobbs, Hungry Joe, Sammy Singer and Chief White Halfoat, as examples) don’t make it into this version. However, the key themes of sanity and insanity, the power and absurdity of bureaucracy, the amorality of capitalism and the shifting definition of heroism remain. In the struggle of the central character against an illogical, intractable and unfair system, there are obvious parallels with Kafka’s ‘The Trial’ which TWC presented in the Spring of 2013.

Like John Yossarian, author Joseph Heller was a bombardier, flying B-25 Mitchell bombers based in Italy during World War II. He started to write ‘Catch 22’ in 1953, but it took him eight years to finish it. Published in the US in 1961, it was only a moderate success, but it became a bestseller in the UK and when the paperback version came out the following year it became a phenomenon, and throughout the 1960s its anti-war stance chimed with the rise of a youth culture embittered by the Vietnam war. The book royalties and movie rights (a film with Alan Arkin, Art Garfunkel and Orson Welles was released in 1970) made Heller a millionaire. In later life it was put to him that he’d never written anything better than ‘Catch 22’ subsequently. His response was a simple ‘Who has?’.

Catch-22 specified that the concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. If you were crazy, you could be grounded. All you have to do was ask; but as soon as you did, you would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. You would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if you didn’t, but if you were sane, you had to fly them. If you flew them, you were crazy and didn’t have to; but if you didn’t want to, you were sane and had to.