Catch-22 is an amazing book. And as is usually the case, the characters all stand out. This is a portrait of Yossarian (you can see him if you look closely), but I'm sure I'll end up sketching out a few of the other oddballs as well.
Yossarian is a B-25 bombadier who doesn't want to bomb. In fact, he wants to avoid his fly missions. In fact, he thinks that pretty much everything is out to get him. He tries to tell his commanders that he's not sane enough to fly, but they respond by saying that only sane people can tell if they are insane, or some such wonderful...Catch-22? Yeah, it's all good stuff. That Yossie. He's a dude. I believe that I remember one instance of him shirking his soldier duties and spending all day sitting in a tree nude. I'm sure there was a reason for it...
You may have wondered about the title of this post. Snowden, a fellow bombadier, was a pretty huge key to Yossarian's attitude. The title is part of a quote that has stuck with me since I read it. You'll have to just read the book to find out more. There, there...there, there...
2 comments:
I really enjoyed Catch-22. The portrait of insanity that the book paints is an interesting one. It kind of ties in to something I've recently read by G. K. Chesterton. In his work Orthodoxy, he describes the insane person as one who is overly logical, rather than one who is overly artistic or lucidly-thinking. The "logical" man will try to put boundaries on the concepts of infinity, the nature of the universe or God. In attempting these feats, he simply destroys his own brain. The mathematician or scientist will go insane long before the artist or poet. Likewise, many of the characters in Catch-22 try to make sense of incomprehensible situations: why they're fighting the war, the fact that they're forced to take the lives of others, the sheer madness of it all. This does not turn them into raving lunatics who see pink elephants but frighteningly normal seeming individuals who are all too in touch with reality. Good stuff.
attaboy, john! great comment. I'm going to eventually do a drawing from a Chesterton book, The Man Who Was Thursday. One of my favorites!
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