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the individual and what is satirized is whatever threatens to destroy the individual. In this regard Catch-22 represents a departure from the social protest of earlier, "proletarian" writers who concentrated on the masses and on social reform. |
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This reference to the individual, however, goes through many faltering stages. One of these stages, that encompassing Yossarian's rebellion and decision not to be brave, trades on a more recent tradition of the anti-hero in general and the anti-war novel in particular. This tradition includes Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, Hasek's The Good Solider Schweik, and Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (as well as Crane and Mailer). The solidarity of this tradition, however, is very ephemeral. The protagonists in this tradition do learn that the reality of war is far different from slogans and oratory about war. But their response to this new awareness and their development from that point as characters take very different forms. Considering Schweik, who always looks out for himself, usually in the guise of some subterfuge, as the anti-heroic model, Catch-22 can be considered part of this tradition only in its preparatory or initial stages (which do, however, cover most of the course of the novel). Militating against this tradition are explicit elements; for example, Yossarian's defense of his patriotism, and implicit themes regarding the inadequacy of the unheroic approach to life. Combining these first two traditions, some of the people satirized are more perfect types of anti-hero than is Yossarian, even in the beginning. (Catch-22 bears more resemblance to A Farewell to Arms, which also falls out of the tradition in terms of the comment made on its hero's development.) |
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What gives rise to identification with this tradition is another closely allied tradition, that of the absurd. Catch-22 does share much with this perspective, a perspective fostered by such authors as Camus, Sartre, and Kafka. Among other things, the emphasis on the individual, the attention to an "irrefutable" bureaucracy, and the general pursuit of irrelevance in the face of a lack of accepted general principles bear out this identification. This identification, too, can only go so far. For one thing, when treated as an absurdist novel, most critics find Catch-22 falls short. Since it is on other grounds, a fine novel, this should indicate not that it fails in that category but that it doesn't fit into that category. For another thing, once again, those who most pursue irrelevance, for example, are also those satirized. |
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What makes absurdism attractive is its roots. Absurdism is born of two traditions. First, there is the classical tradition wherein the hero had to make sense of the world, if he could, out of the materials of his own struggles rather than from the way his world presented itself. Second, there is the existential tradition, wherein the hero casts off preconceptions and moral idealism either for despair or for moral realism. And it is these two sources which inform Catch-22. |
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