Examine the passage beginning 'Yossarian looked at him…' and ending with '…if he's got flies in his eyes (p52). Discuss the extract, examining the issues it raises and how Heller treats them here and elsewhere in the novel.

Authors Avatar

Examine the passage beginning ‘Yossarian looked at him…’ and ending with ‘…if he’s got flies in his eyes (p52).  Discuss the extract, examining the issues it raises and how Heller treats them here and elsewhere in the novel.

        In Orwell’s prophetic ‘Nineteen Eighty Four’, O’Brien presents an anti-realist perspective on truth and mankind’s understanding of reality.  His claim to ‘dictate truth’ by defining it verbally, impinging upon Winston’s interpretation of events, is suggestive of a certain pliability to truth.  This philosophy of subjectivism is similarly directly relevant to ‘Catch 22’ that, while set in history, is significantly set on an island that ‘could obviously not accommodate all of the actions’.  Both the incredulity of many arguments in the novel, and its imprecise, ephemeral setting concur with the notion that events represent a microcosm of the modern world.  Furthermore, as in ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, they also demonstrate an anti-realist approach to truth that inevitably leads to the manipulation of logic, a manipulation that is encapsulated in the elusive form of Catch 22.  

        This transcendent quality to both events and logic permeates the narrative and is perhaps clearest in the erratic structure of the novel.  In adopting this Heller seeks to make the text reflect the events that are portrayed within it.  The shift between Yossarian discussing Catch 22 with Doc Daneeka and the catch 22 situation of ‘the flies Orr saw in Appleby’s eyes’* exemplifies this seemingly random development of the plot, with different strands of the novel only being revealed in a haphazard fashion.  . Similarly, the change in diction and syntax within the extract from Yossarian seeming simplistic and inquisitive, to the ambiguity of ‘spinning reasonableness’, seems to seek to confuse.  In the explanation of catch 22, the narrative becomes distinctly convoluted and, at times verbose, perhaps therefore reflecting the illogicality and confusion generated by that which it seeks to explain.  G.Hicks reflects that the disjointed chronology means that ‘the reader becomes a little dizzy’ and this aligns the reader with the disjointed nature of the soldiers’ lives.   Moreover, while the majority of chapters begin by orderly focusing on their namesake, this structure soon degenerates in a pattern that, crucially, is recurrent until the final few chapters.  Not only does this narrative style seem consistent and indeed indicative of the seeming illogicality of characters such as Orr, and events such as his ‘practice’ crash landings, the dramatic change to chronological prose in the later chapters directly reflects the climax of depravity that is portrayed at that stage, in the ‘night that was filled with horrors’.  

Join now!

In the same way as the consistently unstable structure of the narrative and syntax, (of that illustrated in the extract) is suddenly changed in Chapter 39, so too does Yossarian’s perspective alter as the novel develops.  The juxtaposition of his ‘respectful whistle’∗ with his later ‘cursing… for there was no object or text to… rip to shreds, trample upon or burn up’ acutely emphasises Yossarian’s appeal for an objective morality in a world determined by the subjective logic of Catch 22.  This sense of horror is directly derived from the fact that initially Yossarian saw the catch in terms of its ...

This is a preview of the whole essay