Catch-22

Yossarian believes that he is the only person in the Army who realizes the war’s absurdity; When he mentions this absurdity to an officer named Clevinger, the latter shouts at Yossarian that he’s “crazy.” However, Yossarian believes that the only “crazy” thing would be to not do everything possible to avoid being killed in the senseless war. Yossarian also believes that everyone is “trying to kill” (23) him, but Clevinger insists that no one wants to kill Yossarian specifically (reassuring him that the enemy, rather, wants to kill everyone). Yossarian pedantically argues with him until Clevinger is “speechless with frustration” (24). To Yossarian, the war seems personal because people keep shooting at him.

Yossarian shares “the most luxurious tent in the squadron” (24) with a bomber pilot named Orr, who has filled the tent with many creature comforts, and an unnamed dead man. When Yossarian returns from the hospital, Orr tells him that Clevinger still has not returned from a mission. Havermeyer, McWatt, Appleby, and Nately all live in tents nearby.

Yossarian remembers the evenings he spent with Clevinger in the officer’s club on the base. One night, he claimed that someone poisoned his food, but Clevinger insisted that no one was trying to kill Yossarian. Yossarian eats at the mess hall—run by First Lieutenant Milo Minderbinder—and talks with the doctor, Doc Daneeka. The doctor angers Yossarian with the news that Colonel Cathcart has once again raised the number of missions that pilots must complete before they can return home: The number has risen from 45 to 50, right when Yossarian has completed 44 missions. Daneeka is “unmoved” (27) by Yossarian’s outrage.

Yossarian complains that the squadron commander, Major Major, will not acknowledge “the dead man” (28) who supposedly shares the tent with Yossarian and Orr. Yossarian listens to Orr tell a strange story about filling his mouth with crab apples; the story is nonsensical, and Orr seems to be doing this purposefully. Orr’s disjointed speaking style infuriates Yossarian, who tries and fails to get Orr to speak coherently. As Orr talks, Yossarian remembers when a naked Italian sex worker hit Orr across the head with a shoe. To Yossarian, Orr seems small—even smaller than the young boy named Huple who lives on the base. Huple lives near Hungry Joe, who suffers from nightmares whenever he is not set to fly a mission. Hungry Joe can keep the whole base awake with his nightmare-induced screaming. He has a tent near where Huple sleeps and near the road where the American men pick up Italian women.

A troupe of entertainers visits the camp for performances that fail to entertain the men; The troupe has been sent by General P. P. Peckem, who has ambitions to take over from General Dreedle, the man currently in charge of Yossarian’s unit. Colonel Cargill now works for Peckem but was previously a marketing executive. In his previous role, he helped Wall Street firms “to establish losses for tax purposes” (32). His current role is very similar; he helps the men lose enthusiasm for their missions; Cargill emphasizes that attendance to the troupe shows is “voluntary,” but he also barks that they must go, and he orders them to have fun while they’re at it. Though many of the men have completed the 50 missions required to be sent home, they anxiously, pessimistically wait for the number to be raised once again. Yossarian talks to Daneeka about Havermeyer, a talented pilot whom the other officers resent for his daring approach to flying. Nowadays, Yossarian’s only aim on missions is to stay alive so he can never fly like Havermeyer. At the base, Havermeyer shoots mice with a rifle. His hobby terrifies Hungry Joe, who hides in one of the ditches that appeared after Milo Minderbinder bombed the squadron.

Yossarian believes that Hungry Joe is “crazy,” but he doesn’t know how to help him. In turn, Hungry Joe thinks Yossarian is “crazy.” Doc Daneeka lives in constant fear that he himself is becoming sick, and he frequently complains about his ailments; he resents his deputies for never finding anything wrong with him. He explains to Yossarian his treatment methods and his fear that he will be sent from Italy to the Pacific, which is “a body of water surrounded on all sides by elephantiasis and other dread diseases” (37). He is also terrified of flying. Daneeka asks Yossarian (and others) to forge his name in the flight logs; in return, he promises to do a favor for Yossarian. When Yossarian asks for a favor, however, Daneeka flatly refuses.

Yossarian attends a meeting with the officers. He asks absurd, unanswerable questions to deliberately obfuscate their orders. Colonel Cathcart and his assistant Korn invent a rule that ensures “the only people permitted to ask questions were those who never did” (38). While talking to his men, Cargill hears a mention of a poet—T. S. Eliot—but, knowing nothing about poetry, he assumes that the reference is a coded message. Soon, the officers are asking one another about the poet’s name as though they are trying to break a tough new cryptographic code. No one recognizes the poet’s name. On the base, the men argue about boredom and the passage of time while using the new skeet shooting range. Dunbar wants to live as dull and as long a life as possible because “what else is there” (41).

Yossarian talks to Doc Daneeka and a Native American intelligence officer named Chief White Halfoat, whom the doctor hates; Halfoat can barely read and is often intoxicated with alcohol. The doctor describes his own unscrupulous money-making methods in New York while Halfoat explains how his family has been forced to move many times because oil companies continue to find oil reserves wherever his family lives. As a result, the Halfoat family are regarded as “human divining rods” (44) and are repeatedly, forcefully displaced.

Yossarian desperately asks Daneeka to give him a medical excuse not to fly—possibly a serious psychiatric diagnosis, some debilitating detachment from reality (his request is highly unspecific). However, Daneeka explains that he cannot diagnose such condition to ground Yossarian, because the military has a paradoxical rule that only a “crazy” man would want to fly missions, so any man who asks to be grounded—even due to ostensible mental illness—must therefore be adequately in possession of his rational faculties. Doctors therefore cannot ground anyone; a soldier must personally ask to be grounded, but the request in itself proves his fitness for service. This, Daneeka says, is known as “Catch-22” (46). Yossarian is impressed. He accepts the doctor’s explanation, just as he accepts many other seemingly absurd stories or explanations, such as Orr’s claim that Appleby has “flies in his eyes” (47).

The men are sent on a mission. Yossarian thinks about how much he hates having to sit at the front of the plane during bombing missions; the man who sits in the nose of the plane is the farthest from the escape hatch, and Yossarian regards the difficulty of escape as a “seething antagonism” (48) against him. When on missions, Yossarian pleads with the pilot to avoid all enemy fire, though Yossarian is the “best man in the group at evasive action, but had no idea why” (49). He remembers a traumatic mission on which the co-pilot, named McWatt, tried to escape enemy fire while a man named Dobbs suddenly panicked and began acting erratic, screaming about a wounded man named Snowden. As the plane spun out of control, Yossarian believed that death was inevitable, and “Snowden lay dying in the back” (50).

Hungry Joe’s tent is near the administrative area. He lives near Huple, who lied about his age to sign up for the Army and claims not to be bothered by Joe’s nightmare screams. Hungry Joe’s 50 completed missions are “no help” (51) as Cathcart always blocks his departure. Shaken by the denial, Hungry Joe retreats into his tent. He tries to block out all sounds and tells Huple to wrap a watch in a sock to prevent the ticking sound from scaring him; any sudden noise makes Joe jump up and scream. Before the war, Joe had been a photographer, and he carries his camera around the base and takes photographs of sex workers whom he convinces to pose nude for him. However, his camera never works, often because of the lens cap or mechanical issues. He gets too excited about taking the photo and, as a result, usually bungles the process. Joe does not know how to behave around women.

When Cathcart again raises the number of missions required to be sent home, Hungry Joe’s nightmares briefly stop. He has reached the necessary number of flights six times, but Cathcart always raises the requirement. Though Joe downplays his nightmares, his screams affect the other men. When Yossarian asks Joe about the nightmares, Joe denies that he dreams at all. Yossarian recalls leading a squadron on a mission to destroy a bridge: A “skinny, harmless kid” (53) named Kraft died on the mission. The best ping pong player in the squadron is Appleby. After one game, Orr is furious at losing to Appleby. He attacks Appleby with the ping pong paddle. Quickly, everyone is fighting. White Halfoat breaks the nose of Colonel Moodus, the young and obnoxious son-in-law of General Dreedle. Because Dreedle hates his son-in-law, he praises Halfoat.

Halfoat plays a joke on Flume, who shares a tent with Halfoat and Daneeka. In a whisper, Halfoat threatens to slit Flume’s throat when he is asleep. Flume stays up all night “in mortal fear” (54-55) of his tentmate. However, Halfoat also can’t sleep because Hungry Joe is screaming. Yossarian asks one of Cathcart’s subordinate officers, named Wintergreen, about the constantly changing mission requirements. Wintergreen blames Catch-22, and Yossarian can think of no rebuttal.

McWatt remarkably maintains his happy disposition even amid the chaos of the war. Yossarian takes McWatt’s happiness as evidence that McWatt is “the craziest combat man of them all” (58). Yossarian reads a letter from Daneeka that instructs the chefs to give Yossarian all the fruit he needs to combat the ongoing (and invented) liver issue. Worried that his liver might improve, Yossarian stops eating any fruit. His fellow officers take his fruit and use it to bribe sex workers in Rome. Milo, the mess officer, tries to persuade Yossarian to stockpile the fresh fruit to sell on the black market. Yossarian declines but, in doing so, gains Milo’s trust. Yossarian explains to Milo how Corporal Snark—who now works for Milo in the mess hall—once added soap to sweet potatoes, poisoning an entire squadron to prove that the men were tasteless “Philistines” (61). Yossarian and the other men ate the food delightedly, making themselves sick so they didn’t have to fly missions.

The intelligence officer searching for the man who forged names on the censored letters arrives in the camp. He doesn’t know that he is searching for Yossarian, and he instead looks for “Washington Irving,” one of the fictional names Yossarian signed on the letters. Milo worries that the officer is investigating his black-market activities. Milo tries to recruit the other men into his scheme; wanting to illustrate how much money they could make, he seemingly nonsensically rips up McWatt’s bed sheets. Yossarian is confused by Milo’s understanding of the economy, which is based mostly on theft, lies, and declarations of moral superiority. However, Milo always seems to make a profit. 

Clevinger is regarded as the smartest man in the squadron. He graduated from Harvard, but even he cannot understand Milo’s unique version of economics. Yossarian and Clevinger first met at boot-camp training in California, where Yossarian quickly diagnosed Cleverly as “a dope” (64). Their boot-camp instructor, Lieutenant Scheisskopf, forced the recruits to parade meaninglessly everyday while his unfaithful wife and her young friend had affairs with many of the men at the boot-camp, including Yossarian. Scheisskopf cared only about the weekly parade competitions. Though his wife wanted nothing more than to be with him and to end her infidelity, he spent all his time scheming ways to win the parade competition. Against Yossarian’s advice to remain quiet, Clevinger suggested to Scheisskopf that the men should democratically elect their own leader, and, though the instructor resented the suggestion, the men won him the next parade competition. Through the invention of new techniques, Scheisskopf was eventually declared the permanent parade champion, and he was hailed as a “true military genius” (69). The parades were canceled.

Clevinger was investigated after a resentful Scheisskopf made allegations against him. The military worried that Clevinger was too intelligent and in possession of dangerous, radical new ideas. After a long discussion about interruptions, rules, and military etiquette, Clevinger was confused. The discussion ended with the colonel shouting at everyone. Clevinger was sentenced to serve 57 ceremonial marches outside the barracks as punishment. Clevinger realized that his fellow Americans hated him far more than the enemy and that nowhere, not even “in all the beer halls in Munich and everywhere else, were there men who hated him more” (75). 

Major Major is one of the officers. Major experienced a difficult childhood: His mother died, and his father named him Major Major Major. After a lifetime of “loneliness and frustration” (76), Major was encouraged to join the Army and was promoted to Major due to a glitch in the military computer that made him Major Major Major Major. Despite his inexperience, he retained the rank. Somehow, Major Major was a major before he even finished his training at Lieutenant Scheisskopf’s boot-camp, and this caused the instructor to sink into “a bottomless gloom” (79). After being sent to Europe, Major found himself in the strange position of outranking everyone but lacking any experience at all. He is shunned and forced into isolation.

Major Major becomes depressed and lonely. To cheer himself up, he writes the name Washington Irving on documents after hearing a rumor about someone else doing the same. The military ranking system confuses him. He does not know, for example, where he outranks Major –– de Coverley. Major reads a report that says a young man has been killed before he was officially added to the squadron’s books. This young man is the dead man from Yossarian’s tent, whose possessions remain in place because the dead young man is caught in bureaucratic limbo. When the intelligence officer inquires about someone signing censored mail as Washington Irving, Major denies any knowledge. The intelligence officer believes him. When a second intelligence officer inquires, he also believes Major and begins investigating the first intelligence officer instead. Tappman is also a suspect. From then on, Major puts on a disguise whenever he wants to sign a document with the name Washington Irving. He also occasionally uses the name John Milton. Major arranges to have no contact with anyone else in the squadron and spends all his time alone. When Major wears his disguise outside, Yossarian tries to get himself grounded by assaulting the major, but Major insists there is “nothing” he can do to ground Yossarian, even though he has been explicitly told not to say this.

Clevinger is presumed dead after he disappears on a mission and “no trace” (93) is found. However, Yossarian believes that Clevinger has fled the Army. He mentions this to Wintergreen, who has gone Absent Without Leave many times and has been demoted each time. Wintergreen believes that desertion is the only patriotic option, so he is happy digging holes on the base as punishment.

Appleby tries to visit Major Major, but he is turned away by Sergeant Towser, Major Major’s assistant, who says that no one can see the major while the major is in his office. Towser ponders “abhorrent extravagance” (95) of the dead man in Yossarian’s tent, who was named Mudd and died two hours after arriving at the base. When Cathcart announces that all the men must partake in a dangerous mission to Bologna, the doctors are forbidden from grounding anyone. Dunbar goes to a doctor named Stubbs to fetch codeine for the supposedly terrified Yossarian. The men discuss Yossarian, referring to him as “that crazy bastard” (97), but they agree that Yossarian’s refusal to fly may make him the only “sane” man on the base.

Captain Black reacts with “delight” (98) to the news that Colonel Cathcart has volunteered his squadron for the dangerous Bologna mission. As Black hates the men, he cannot wait to see the looks of fear on their faces. He also resents Major Major for being promoted into a position to which Black feels entitled. Black tries to undermine Major by starting a rumor that the major is secretly a communist. In contrast, he loudly proclaims his own patriotism and makes the men sign oaths of loyalty to the United States as part of his “Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade” (99). The men complain about the dull, time-consuming oaths. By withholding any of the oaths from Major Major, Black hopes to prove that the major is disloyal. He also attempts to enlist Major –– de Coverley in his plot against Major Major but fails. Inspired by Major –– de Coverley’s refusal, the other men begin to ignore the oaths. Though he is “deeply disillusioned by this treacherous stab in the back” (102), Black insists that the oaths impressed Colonel Cathcart. He does not know that Cathcart thinks that Black lacks intelligence.