Catch-22
by Joseph Heller
(London: Vintage, 2011)
It was love at first sight.
The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.
Page 7.
Yossarian was disappointed to learn that the lives of enlisted men were only slightly more interesting than the lies of officers. After the first day he had no curiosity at all. To break the monotony he invented games. Death to all modifiers, he declared one day, and out of every letter that passed through his hands went every adverb and every adjective. The next day he made war on articles. He reached a much higher place plane of creativity the following day when he blacked out everything in the letters but a, an and the. That erected more dynamic intralinear tensions, he felt, and in just about every case left a message far more universal.
Page 8.
Dunbar was lying motionless on his back again with his eyes staring up at the ceiling like a doll’s. he was working hard at increasing his life span. He did it by cultivating boredom. Dunbar was working so hard at increasing his life span that Yossarian thought he was dead.
Page 9.
Insanity is contagious.
Page 15.
The colonel was in Communications, and he was kept busy day and night transmitting glutinous messages from the interior into square pads of gauze which he sealed meticulously and delivered to a covered white pail that stood on the night table beside his bed.
Page 16.
McWatt was crazy. He was a pilot and flew his plane as low as he dared over Yossarin’s tent as often as he could, just to see how much he could frighten him, and loved to go buzzing with a wild, close roar over the wooden raft floating on empty oil drums out past the sand bar at the immaculate white beach where the men went swimming naked.
Page 20.
As far back as Yossarian could recall, he explained to Clevinger wit a patient smile, somebody was always hatching a plot to kill him. There were people who cared for him and people who didn’t, and those who didn’t hated him and were out to get him. They hated him because he was Assyrian.
Page 22.
Failure did not come easily.
Page 31.
Losing money was no simple matter. It took months of hard work and careful misplanning.
Page 31.
Colonel Cargill could be relied on to run the most prosperous enterprise into the ground. He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody.
Page 31.
It made him proud to observe that twenty-nine months in the service had not blunted his genius for ineptitude.
Page 32.
Havermeyer was a lead bombardier who never took evasive action going in to the target and thereby increased the danger of all the men who flew in the same formation with him.
Page 33.
Havermeyer was the best damned bombardier they had, but he flew straight and level all the way from the I.P. to the target, and even far beyond the target until he saw the falling bombs strike ground and explode in t a darting spurt of abrupt orange that flashed beneath the swirling pall of smoke and pulverized debris geysering up wildly in huge, rolling waves of gray and black.
Page 33.
Havermeyer was a lead bombardier who never missed. Yossarian was a lead bombardier who had been demoted because he no longer gave a damn whether he missed or not. He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt, and his only mission each time he went up was to come down alive.
Page 33.
Yossarian did not give a damn whether he hit the target or not, just as long as Havermeyer or one of the other lead bombardiers did and they never had to go back.
Page 34.
Doc Daneeka was a very neat, clean man whose idea of a good time was to sulk.
Page 36.
Yossarian, with his temperature of 101, could go to the hospital whenever he wanted to because he was not afraid of them.
Page 37.
The only people permitted to ask questions were those who never did.
Page 40.
“You’re inches away from death every time you go on a mission. How much older can you be at your age?”
Page 44.
“Maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if it’s to seem long.”
Page 44.
“You can’t let crazy people decide whether you’re crazy or not, can you?”
Page 51.
“Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn’t really crazy.”
There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the fact of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and cold be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr, would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.
Page 52.
The only thing that stopped him from abandoning his post under fire and scurrying back through the crawlway like a yellow-bellied rat was his unwillingness to entrust the evasive action out of the target area to anybody else.
Page 56.
There was no established procedure for evasive action. All you needed was fear, and Yossarian had plenty of that.
Page 56.
He bolted for his life wildly on each mission the instant his bombs were away.
Page 56.
Women killed Hungry Joe. His response to them as sexual beings was one of frenzied worship and idolatry. They were lovely, satisfying, maddening manifestations of miraculous, instruments of pleasure too powerful to be measured, too keen to be endured, and too exquisite to be intended for employment by base, unworthy man.
Page 59.
It made sense to cry out in pain every night.
Page 62.
That men would die was a matter of necessity; which men would die, though, was a matter of circumstance, and Yossarian was willing to be the victim of anything but circumstance.
Page 77.
Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. With Major Major it had been all three. Even among men lacking all distinction he inevitably stood out as a man lacking more distinction than all the rest, and people who met him were always impressed by how unimpressive he was.
Page 95.
“Maybe we’re confronted with a gang, with two men working together who just happen to have opposite names.”
Page 109.
People who did lie were, on the whole, more resourceful and ambitious and successful than people who did not lie.
Page 111.
“The enemy … is anybody who’s going to get you killed, no matter which side he’s on.”
Page 143.
“That might be the answer - to act boastfully about something we ought to be ashamed of. That’s a trick that never seems to fail.”
Page 160.
He could picture, as he walked, the kind of underclothing they wore against their svelte feminine parts, filmy, smooth, clinging garments of deepest black or of opalescent pastel radiance with flowering lace borders fragrant with the tantalizing fumes of pampered flesh and scented bath salts rising in a germinating cloud from their blue-white breasts.
Page 179.
All he was expected to do in the hospital was die or get better, and since he was perfectly all right to begin with, getting better was easy.
Page 190.
People knew a lot more about dying inside the hospital and made a much neater, more orderly job of it.
Page 191.
People gave up the ghost with delicacy and taste inside the hospital. There was none of that crude, ugly ostentation about dying that was so common outside the hospital.
Page 191.
The soldier in white was constructed entirely of gauze, plaster and a thermometer, and the thermometer was merely an adornment left balanced in the empty dark hole in the bandages over his mouth early each morning and late each afternoon by |Nurse Cramer and Nurse Duckett right up to the afternoon Nurse Cramer read the thermometer and discovered he was dead.
Page 192.
No sound at all came from the soldier in white all the time he was there. The ragged round hole over his mouth was deep and jet black and showed no sign of lip, teeth, palate or tongue.
Page 193.
The soldier in white was more like a stuffed and sterilized mummy than a real nice guy.
Page 194.
There were so many diseases that it took a truly diseased mind to even think about them.
Page 198.
He wondered often how he would ever recognize the first chill, flush, twinge, ache, belch, sneeze, stain, lethargy, vocal slip, loss of balance or lapse of memory that would signal the inevitable beginning of the inevitable end.
Page 199.
When he contemplated the many diseases and potential accidents threatening him, he was positively astounded that he had managed to survive in good health for as long as he had. It was miraculous.
Page 202.
Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of creation?
Page 206.
“The God I don’t believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He’s not the mean and stupid God you make Him out to be.”
Page 208.
As far as we’re concerned, one dying boy is just as good as any other, or just as bad. To a scientist, all dying boys are equal.
Page 210.
“We’re all in this baseness of illusion together. I’m always willing to lend a helping hand to a fellow conspirator along the road to survival if he’s willing to do the same for me.”
Page 210.
Colonel Cathcart lived by his wits in an unstable, arithmetical world of black eyes and feathers in his cap, of overwhelming imaginary triumphs and catastrophic imaginary defeats.
Page 217.
Corporal Whitcomb, an atheist, was a disgruntled subordinate who felt he could do the chaplain’s job much better than the chaplain was doing it and viewed himself, therefore, as an underprivileged victim of social inequality.
Page 231.
There was so much unhappiness in the world, he reflected, bowing his head dismally beneath the tragic thought, and there was nothing he could do about anybody’s, least of all his own.
Page 239.
Yossarian - the very sight of the name made him shudder. There were so many esses init. It just had to be subversive. It was like the word subversive itself. It was like seditious and insidious too, and like socialist, suspicious, fascist and Communist. It was an odious, alien, distasteful name, that just did not inspire confidence.
Page 241.
Colonel Korn was the lawyer, and if Colonel Korn assured him that fraud, extortion, currency manipulation, embezzlement, income tax evasion and blackmarket speculations were legal, Colonel Cathcart was in no position to disagree with him.
Page 242.
The colonel was certainly not going to waste his time and energy making love to beautiful women unless there was something in it for him.
Page 243.
The war was crawling with group commanders who were merely doing their duty, and it required just some sort of dramatic gesture like making his group fly more combat missions than any other bomber group to spotlight his unique qualities of leadership.
Page 246.
General Dreedle’s nurse was chubby, short and blond. She had plump dimpled cheeks, happy blue eyes, and neat curly turned-up hair. She smiled at everyone and never spoke at all unless she was spoken to. Her bosom was lush and her complexion clear. She was irresistible and men edged away from her carefully. She was succulent, sweet, docile and dumb, and she drove everyone crazy but General Dreedle.
Page 248.
He believed that the young men who took orders form him should be willing to give up their lives for the ideals, aspirations and idiosyncrasies of old men he took orders from. The officers and enlisted men in his command had identity for him only as military quantities. All he asked was that they do their work; beyond that, they were free to do whatever they pleased. They were free, as Colonel Cathcart was free, to force their men to fly sixty missions if they chose, and they were free, as Yossarian had been free, to stand in formation naked if they wanted to.
Page 249.
General Dreedle’s nurse always followed General Dreedle everywhere he went, even into the briefing room just before the mission to Avignon, where she stood wither asinine smile at the side of the platform and bloomed like a fertile oasis at General Dreedle’s shoulder in her pink and green uniform.
Page 252.
Orr was knocked down into the water or had an engine shot out almost every time he went up.
Page 262.
Milo had been elected mayor of Palermo - and of nearby Carini, Monreale, Bagheria, Termini Imerese, Cefali, Mistretta and Nicosia as well - because he had brought Scotch to Sicily.
Page 269.
Milo was not only the Vice-Shah of Oran, as it turned out, but also the Caliph of Baghdad, the Imam of Damascus, and the Sheik of Araby. Milo was the corn god, the rain god and the rice god in backward regions where such crude gods were still worshiped by ignorant and superstitious people, and deep inside the jungles of Africa, he intimated with becoming modesty, large graven images of his mustached face couple be found overlooking primitive stone altars red with human blood.
Page 273.
He girl Natley had fallen so deeply in love with began swearing at him sullenly with rising, menacing resentment.
Page 276.
“The Germans are being driven out, and we are still here. In a few years you will be gone, too, and we will still be here. You see, Italy is really a very poor and weak country, and that’s what makes us so strong. Italian soldiers are not dying any more. But American and German soldiers are. I call that doing extremely well. Yes, I am quite certain that Italy will survive this war and still be in existence long after your won country has been destroyed.”
Page 278.
“Rome was destroyed, Greece was destroyed, Persia was destroyed, Spain was destroyed. All great countries are destroyed. Why not yours? How much longer do you really think your own country will last? Forever? Keep in mind that the earth itself is destined to be destroyed by the sun.”
Page 279.
“You put so much stock in winning wars,” the grubby iniquitous old man scoffed. “The real trick lies in losing wars, in knowing which wars can be lost. Italy has been losing wars for centuries, and just see how splendidly we’ve done nonetheless.”
Page 281.
“I was a fascist when Mussolini was on top, and I am an anti-fascist now that he has been deposed. It was fanatically pro-German when the Germans were here to protect us against the Americans, and now that the Americans are here to protect us against the Germans I am fanatically pro-American. I can assure you, my outraged young friend” - the old man’s knowing, disdainful eyes shone even more effervescently as Nately’s stuttering dismay increased - “that you and your country will have a no more loyal partisan in Italy than me - but only as long as you remain in Italy.”
Page 281.
“Anything worth dying for,” answered the sacrilegious old man, “is certainly worth living for.”
Page 283.
Planes arrived for Milo form airfields in Italy, North Africa and England, and from Air Transport command stations in Liberia, Ascension Island, Cairo, and Karachi.
Page 290.
Yossarian also thought that Milo was a jerk but he also knew that Milo was a genius.
Page 291.
Business boomed on every battlefront.
Page 292.
“Sure, we’re at war with them. But the Germans are also members in good standing of the syndicate, and it’s my job to protect their rights as shareholders.”
Page 294.
One night, after a sumptuous evening meal, all Milo’s fighters and bombers took off, joined in formation directly overhead and began dropping bombs on the group. He had landed another contract with the Germans, this time to bomb his own outfit.
Page 295.
He was never without misery, and never without hope.
Page 308.
Everyone was always very friendly toward him, and no one was ever very nice; everyone spoke to him, and o one ever said anything.
Pages 309-310.
To simulate gravity, feign grief and pretend supernatural intelligence of the hereafter in so fearsome and arcane a circumstance as death seemed the most criminal of offenses.
Page 312.
The chaplain was sincerely a very helpful person who was never able to help anyone.
Page 313.
Nurse Cramer was a good-hearted, sentimental creature who rejoiced unselfishly at news of weddings, engagements, births and anniversaries even though she was unacquainted with any of the people involved.
Page 335.
“They’re not going to send a crazy man out to be killed, are they?”
“Who else would go?”
Page 350.
Orr was a happy and unsuspecting simpleton with a thick mass of wavy polychromatic hair parted down the center. … Yossarian felt a flood of compassion sweep over him.
Orr was an eccentric midget, a freakish, likable dwarf with a smutty mind and a thousand valuable skills that would keep him in a low income group all his life.
Page 359.
“While none of the work we do is very important, it is important that we do a great deal of it.”
Page 368.
General Peckem liked listening to himself talk, liked most of all listening to himself talk about himself.
Page 370.
He thirsted for life and reached out ravenously to grasp and hold Duckett’s flesh.
Page 388.
The shock McWatt gave him one day with the plane that came blasting suddenly into sight out of the distant stillness and hurtled mercilessly along the shore line with a great growling, clattering roar over the bobbing raft on which blond, pale Kid Sampson, is naked sides scrawny even from so far away, leaped clownishly up to touch it at the exact moment some arbitrary gust of wind or minor miscalculation of McWatt’s sense dropped the speeding plane down just low enough for a propeller to slice him half away.
Page 388.
There was the briefest, softest tsst! Filtering audibly through the shattering, overwhelming howl of the plane’s engines, and then there were just Kid Sampson’s two pale, skinny legs, still joined by strings somehow at the bloody truncated hops, standing stock-still on the raft for what seemed a full minute or two before they toppled over backward into the water finally with a faint, echoing splash and turned completely upside down so that only the grotesque toes and the plaster-white soles of Kid Sampson’s feet remained in view.
Page 388.
Kid Sampson had rained all over. Those who spied drops of him on their limbs or torsos drew back with terror and revulsion, as though trying to shrink away from their own odious skins.
Page 389.
McWatt turned again, dipped his wings once in salute, decided oh, well, what the hell, and flew into a mountain.
Page 390.
Everyone in the squadron knew that Kid Sampson’s skinny legs had washed up on the wet sand to lie there and rot like a purple twisted wishbone. No one would go to retrieve them, not Gus or Wes or even the men in the mortuary at the hospital; everyone made believe that Kid Sampson’s legs were not there, that they had bobbed away south forever on the tide like all of Clevinger and Orr.
Page 397.
The number of dead people just seemed to increase. And the Germans were still fighting. Death was irreversible, he suspected, and he began to think he was going to lose.
Page 398.
To abandon Orr’s tent would be to abandon Orr.
Page 399.
The chaplain had mastered, in a moment of divine intuition, the handy technique of protective rationalization, and he was exhilarated by his discover. It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truthy, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.
Page 417.
Milo had been caught red-handed in the at of plundering his countrymen, and, as a result, his stock had never been higher.
Page 423.
The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them.
Page 464.
It was odd how many wrongs leaving money seemed to right.
Page 468.
“I like the way you lie. You’ll go far in this world if you ever acquire some decent ambition.”
Page 485.
He started toward the staircase with a jaunty and exhilarated air. A private in green fatigues saluted him. Yossarian returned the salute happily, staring at the private with curiosity. He looked strangely familiar. When Yossarian returned the salute, the private in green fatigues turned suddenly into Nately’s whore and lunged at him murderously with a bone-handled kitchen knife that caught him in the side below his upraised arm.
Page 492.
Man was matter, that was Snowden’s secret. Drop him out a window and he’ll fall. Set fire to him and he’ll burn. Bury him and he’ll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden’s secret. Ripeness was all.
Page 504.
They can get all the witnesses they need simply by persuading them that destroying you is for the good of the country.
Page 507.
“I’m not running away from my responsibilities. I’m running to them. There’s nothing negative about running away to save my life.”
Page 516.
“I wouldn’t want to live without strong misgivings.”
Page 518.
Yossarian jumped. Nately’s whore was hiding just outside the door. The knife came down, missing him by inches, and he took off.
Page 519,
Joseph Heller’s vocabulary
“Otiose” - page 279.
“Mucid” - page 356.
“Stertorous” - page 360.
“Fustian” - page 380.
“Callipygous” - page 384.
“Pullulating” - page 394.
“Calcareous” - page 401.
“Sententiously” - page 430.
“Exophthalmic” - page 506.
You make it easier for yourself as a novelist if you announce clearly what you are at the outset and don’t deviate.
Page 522.
Only the quietest craftsmanship can convey the illusion of sustained noise.
Page 523.
Catch-22 bursts upon us with superfluous, almost blasphemous mirth, the joke of it being a man with whom Yossarian, like the heroine of some high schlock romance, has fallen madly in love, and a chaplain at that, throwing everything, including credibility, into confusion.
Page 523.
The phrase Catch-22 has passed into the language, to stand for a situation which frustrates you by the paradoxical rules or circumstances that govern it, something that gets you whichever way you move, a sort of existential Sod’s law, but the meanings which accrue to it in the novel are more various, more subtly absurd, and more universally intractable.
Page 523.
Just as absurdity bets absurdity in Heller’s world, so does character beget character.
Page 524.
Yossarian, like the chaplain earlier, is face to face not just with death but with his own inadequacy before it.
Page 526.