Yossarian: Summary And Analysis

The second passage I chose was not about Yossarian’s character, though it may deal with how frustrated he finds his new roomates, but about the glamorization of war.
“They were the most depressing group of people Yossarian had ever been with. They were always in high spirits. They laughed at everything. They called him ‘Yo-Yo’ jocularly and came in tipsy late at night and woke him up with their clumsy, bumping, giggling efforts to be quiet, then bombarded him with asinine shouts of hilarious good-fellowship when he sat up cursing to complain. He wanted to massacre them each time they did. They reminded him of Donald Duck’s nephews. They were afraid of Yossarian and persecuted him incessantly with nagging generosity and with their exasperating insistence on doing small favors for him. They were reckless, puerile, congenial, naive, presumptuous, deferential and rambunctious. They were dumb; they had …show more content…
This criticism of a controversial aspect of war is thrown in the face of the reader when Yossarian suddenly has new roomates. They bust in to his tent and begin rejoicing at the opportunity to see real combat. Heller paints wide eyed men who look up to heroes, surrounded by those who have been in war, and have yet to spot or become heroes themselves. Yossarian pities them in their childlike awe, wishing he “could be young and cheerful, too” (Heller 349). He follows up that wish with another thought, that “one or two were killed and the rest wounded”, causing them to stop romanticizing war (Heller 349). This jab at a world in which war is valued highly, especially in the eyes of a child, is effective because of how blatant and glaring the situation is. Yossarian is forced to live with young men who romanticize war, and so romanticize death. In this context the reader sees how wrong it is for little kids to look forward to becoming bitter, war hardened men like the rest of the