Joseph Heller: Catch-22

George Orwell: 1984

Plot:

The story of Winston Smith presents the world in the year 1984, after a global atomic war, via his perception of life in Airstrip One (England or Britain), a province of Oceania, one of the world's three superstates; his intellectual rebellion against the Party and illicit romance with Julia; and his consequent imprisonment, interrogation, torture, and re-education by the Thinkpol in the Miniluv.

Characters:
Winston Smith—the protagonist, is a phlegmatic everyman.

Julia—Winston's lover, is a covert "rebel from the waist downwards" who publicly espouses Party doctrine as a member of the fanatical Junior Anti-Sex League.

Big Brother—the dark-eyed, mustachioed embodiment of the Party who rule Oceania.

O'Brien—a member of the Inner Party who poses as a member of The Brotherhood, the counter-revolutionary resistance, in order to deceive, trap, and capture Winston and Julia.

Emmanuel Goldstein—a former leader of the Party, the counter-revolutionary author of The Book, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, and leader of the Brotherhood. He is the symbolic Enemy of the State—the national nemesis who ideologically unites the people of Oceania with the Party, especially during the Two Minutes Hate, and other fearmongering by the Inner Party. It is unknown whether he is real or a fabrication of the Party itself for the purpose of propaganda.

Analysis: Chapters IV-VI

Though his stay at the Ministry of Love has broken his mind and will and though his love for Big Brother precludes the need to think for himself, Winston still envisions the day that the Party will shoot him. This apparent death wish has led to some speculation that the key to Winston’s character is his fatalism, that he rebels against the Party not because he desires freedom, but because he wants the Party to kill him. Given Orwell’s political aspirations for 1984, this consideration seems to diminish the intent of the work. 1984 may include psychological imbalance among its list of ill effects of totalitarian government, but it seems clear that it is not primarily about psychological imbalance. The main purpose of the novel is to chronicle the workings of the Party’s control over the minds of its subjects in order to warn readers of the dangers of totalitarianism. If all of Winston’s problems were caused by an innate, unusual psychological disorder, then this overriding theme would become irrelevant.

Many consider 1984’s pivotal scene—in which O’Brien threatens to release the cage of rats on Winston’s face—an anticlimax. It has been argued that the cage of rats is not horrible enough to make the reader feel Winston’s torment, and that it is an arbitrary device, unrelated to the powerful, sophisticated workings of the Party. At first glance, these criticisms seem valid. Winston’s collapse does follow hard upon his passionate restatement of his love for Julia and hatred for Big Brother in Chapter IV. However, it is important to remember the theme of physical control, which manifests itself in the Party’s manipulation of the body: Orwell consistently argues that physical pain and the sense of physical danger can override human reason. Winston, facing a writhing swarm of rats prepared to devour his face, cannot act rationally. That his betrayal of Julia occurs so soon after he restates his love for her is precisely the point, as physical pain eliminates the possibility of defending emotional conviction. As Winston notes earlier in the novel, he is a prisoner of his own nervous system. Turning against Julia is an instinctive lunge for self-preservation. Rather than the rats themselves, it is the awareness, foisted upon him by the Party, that he is a prisoner of his own body that ultimately breaks Winston. Once he believes that he is limited by his body, he has no reason to think, act, or rebel.

Joseph Heller: Catch-22

Plot:

A bombardier in World War II tries desperately to escape the insanity of the war. However, sometimes insanity is the only sane way cope with a crazy situation. Catch-22 is a parody of a "military mentality" and of a bureaucratic society in general.

Characters:

Captain John Yossarian - is a fictional character in Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22 and its sequel Closing Time, and the protagonist of both books. In Catch-22, Yossarian is a 28-year-old Captain and B-25 bombardier in the 256th Bombardment Squadron of the Army Air Corps, stationed on the small island of Pianosa off the Italian mainland during World War II.

Tappman - is a naïve Anabaptist minister from Kenosha, Wisconsin, who is tormented throughout the novel by his rude, manipulative atheist assistant, Corporal Whitcomb.

A full colonel, Chuck Cathcart - is a group commander at the U.S. Army Air Corps base in Pianosa and is obsessed with becoming a general.

Dr. Dan Daneeka - is the squadron flight surgeon and a friend of the novel's protagonist, Yossarian.

First Lieutenant Milo Minderbinder - is the mess officer at the U.S. Army Air Corps base and he becomes obsessed with expanding mess operations and trading goods for the profits of the syndicate (in which he and everyone else "has a share").

Lieutenant Nately - Nately's family originally enlisted him to serve in the Air Corps, believing the war would be over by the time he finished his training and that he would mingle with "gentlemen." Therefore, Nately could gain the pride of enlisting without actually having to fight. Instead, he mingled with Yossarian and Dunbar, and was sent overseas

Scheisskopf - is the training unit commander for Yossarian and Clevinger, and he takes a particular dislike to Clevinger.

Snowden - is a member of Yossarian's flight during a mission, and acts as catalyst for the fundamental change in Yossarian's mentality and outlook.

Captain Aardvark (called Aarfy) - is the navigator in Yossarian's B-25 bomber (but only when Yossarian is flying in the lead ship - hence Aarfy's sporadic appearances in the air in the novel).

Analysis: Chapters 17-21

In Catch-22, the hospital is certainly not a place where heroic doctors heal grateful patients, but Yossarian’s ridiculous experience in this chapter goes so far as to parody the idea of a hospital as a place where death can be confronted and properly mourned. For Yossarian, the hospital is nothing more than a refuge from the atrocities that occur outside its walls, and he is unable to understand why a family would want to arrive at a hospital to watch their son die. The hospital staff further parodies the hospital as a site of grief by requesting that Yossarian pretend to be a dying soldier for the sake of a family whose real son has already passed away. Adding somber draperies and stinking flowers to the room, the hospital is as unable as the rest of the bureaucracy to take death seriously, and the family members who do mourn their son’s or brother’s passing are comically portrayed as overly sentimental. While one might expect that a war would underline the fragility of life and make those involved appreciate ritual celebrations of life and mourning of death all the more, in Catch-22 the war numbs these characters to the effects of death, which has become a mundane, daily occurrence. As a result, the actions of those who still take death seriously are incomprehensible or meaningless to those involved in the war. Heller’s statement, however, is not that life is meaningless; it would be a mistake to assume that Yossarian’s attitude or the doctors’ attitudes toward death are Heller’s own. Rather, it seems that the novel’s purpose in displaying such an unconventional portrait of mourning is to show the absurd behavior that war forces humans to adopt—reaching a point where not even the loss of life is impressive.

In one of the novel’s manifold contradictions, two atheists, Yossarian and Mrs. Scheisskopf, argue over what kind of God they do not believe in and address the nature of God in a debate. The God in whom Mrs. Scheisskopf does not believe is good and all-knowing, whereas Yossarian’s deity is bumbling and confused. Yossarian’s argument is typical: that a truly compassionate God would not have allowed all the unpleasantness and pain in the world. But the details that Yossarian uses to argue his point are unusual: he asks why God would create phlegm, tooth decay, or incontinence. Yossarian is not just angry with the God that he does not believe in, but he also ridicules him. Mrs. Scheisskopf, on the other hand, prefers not to believe in a good and righteous God, arguing that if one is not going to believe in God, one might as well not believe in a good God. In this way, the idea of God can be useful, even if it is not accurate. The contrast between the chaplain and his assistant, the atheist Corporal Whitcomb, further develops this paradox. The chaplain, who does believe in God, has a very quiet, nonintrusive manner as he ministers to the men in the squadron, which does not turn many men toward religion. Corporal Whitcomb, on the other hand, wants to enter into a full-scale religious campaign, which would include revivals and form letters sent from the chaplain to the families of men killed in combat. Like Mrs. Scheisskopf, Whitcomb’s lack of belief in God allows him to see religion as a useful tool.

The ambitious, foolish, and compulsive Colonel Cathcart dominates the second half of this section, which focuses on the dehumanizing power of bureaucracy. Colonel Cathcart wants to be a general, for no reason other than that he is not a general now. His ludicrous tallying of black eyes and feathers in his cap would be amusing if it did not directly result in his unfailing willingness to risk his men’s lives. As it is, Colonel Cathcart is only sickeningly amusing. When Chapter 21 reveals that he does not have a chance of becoming a general, his arbitrary increase of the number of missions his men must fly seems even more meaningless. The poor, ineffectual chaplain wants very much to help Yossarian and his friends, but all his moral convictions are frail and flimsy before the unanswerable authority of men like Cathcart and Korn.

The chaplain’s sensation of déjà vu reminds us that in the disordered temporal structure of Heller’s story, some events do actually happen twice. But the chaplain defines his déjà vu not in terms of time but as “the subtle, recurring confusion between illusion and reality”—a confusion that becomes quite serious in these chapters. Yossarian, for example, constructs illusory sicknesses, but doctors are inexplicably unable or unwilling to tell the difference between real and artificial sickness. Frequently, these sicknesses take on the illusory nature of performances. In Chapter 18, Yossarian’s admiration for the performance of the man who sees everything twice leads him to imitate that performance. When the man dies in the night, however, Yossarian does not acknowledge the authenticity of the man’s sickness; instead, he decides that the man took his performance too far. In order to avoid encountering the ultimate realities of the war—death, pain, and fighting—the men create illusions that blur the lines between what is real and what is not.

Date: 2015-12-18; view: 772