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fully against the ethical background of our culture. Even Yossarian's nudity is an extension of the Genesis allusion. |
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The chapter is a model of structure as it mixes horror and comedy without stopping to draw distinctions between the two. Further, it adds more detail to the picture of Yossarian's post-Avignon nudity and gives us a picture of another side of Doc Daneeka's nature. In fact, Doc Daneeka's daring and commitment are here the absolute contrast to Milo's expediency, despite being given here as evidence that he has lost his head. |
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Having portrayed Milo in Chapter 24, this chapter gives us a portrait of his opposite, the chaplain, a man we are told, ''who had conscience and character." He is also a man torn between two poles, a tension which creates in him both skepticism and hope. On the one hand, there is the mystical chaplain who has visions and believes in the reality of some "spiritual epoch." Then there is the intellectual chaplain whose "mind was open on every subject," making him uncertain of everything. |
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There are, indeed, two "centers" in the chaplain's life, although Yossarian mistakes them for physical centers in his explanation of deja vu, "a momentary . . . lag in the operation of two coactive sensory nerve centers that commonly functioned together." The lag in the chaplain's case is between his intellectual life and his spiritual life. This is responsible for his sense of deja vu, and also for his sense that deja vu, jamais vu, presque vu are not "elastic enough" to cover the situation. In other words, we are back to the theme of an alternative way of seeing the world; and here we are given a view of one more condition, the chaplain's, which stands in the way of that alternative. Elasticity, incidentally, is a term Kierkegaard uses to characterize irony. |
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It is this gap, too, which accounts for his obsessive fears, for instance for his wife, and his sense, upon leaving Major Major's headquarters, of being chased by "peals of derisive laughter." Nevertheless, the chaplain has one sense which keeps him from being overcome by these fears and which offers hope of his coming to a new perception, and that sense is that "kindness and good manners" are more crucial than "complex questions of ontology." The chaplain needs, however, some view of things to justify that sense. |
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As we have seen earlier, the subject of deja vu is abetted by the structure of the book. Here, too, confused time schemes and the repetitious forms of argument, such as we have here between Col. Cathcart and Gen. Dreedle, create an almost deja vu phenomenon for the reader. |
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