Literary Analysis Essay On Catch 22

The Original Catch-22 War is brutal and cruel, but it can also absurd as Joseph Heller vividly shows in his first novel Catch-22. Heller would certainly know about war. He fought in World War 2 as a bombardier and flew 60 missions over Italy. After his tour of duty, he wrote Catch-22, a satire, to protest war and show the irrationality of it. In the novel, Yossarrian is a bombardier pilot who is trying to survive in a squadron where the colonel keeps raising the number of missions they have to fly before they can go home. Yossairian is stuck in a hilarious paradox, Catch-22. Anyone who keeps flying dangerous missions is considered crazy and should be grounded. All the pilot has to do is ask to be grounded, but if he asks to be grounded, he is no longer crazy and has to keep flying missions. Although Heller’s writing style and dialogue can be difficult to understand at times, Catch-22 is an original novel that vividly portrays the absurdity of war and is definitely worth reading.
The dialogue in Catch-22 is different than any other novel’s. The dialogue is written so that the characters have only one side to them. They have the same emotion all throughout the book. Yossarian hates flying and is always complaining, Aarfy obsesses over women and is …show more content…
In the book, he describes a man’s death in the back of a plane so gruesomely you can almost see his innards fall out of his body. But he does this in such a humorous way that nobody can help but laugh. It is not until you laugh at someone describing a gruesome death that you realize how absurd the world really is. Another place he uses dark humor in the book is when the Colonel is trying to get casualties. “That’s right,” the colonel explained exuberantly. “The sooner we get some casualties, the sooner we can make some progress on this. I’d like to get to the Christmas issue if we can. I imagine the circulation is higher then.” (Heller, pg.