There are so many books out there that we keep a mental list of as books that should be read but for one reason or another haven’t been. Catch-22 has been one of those books for me. It wasn’t ever one of the books I had to read for any of my literature classes. At no point in college were all my friends reading this book and I had to read it too to join in the dinner table discussion. Catch-22 was a book I had to seek out and read for myself. In a way, it made the reading of this book all the more enjoyable. I wanted to do this. No one was forcing me. I didn’t even read it thinking I would write a review about it for Ariadne’s Thread.

Imagine my predatory delight when I discovered the book was not only light hearted but quite nihilistic. The protagonist is Captain Yossarian, a bombardier in the U.S. Army in World War Two. Unlike many war novels, Catch-22 only uses the war as a backdrop and as a source of death. Yossarian, and the other men in his group, are suffering in a hell Dante couldn’t conceive of, but Scott Adams could. In this hell Yossarian’s superior officers are too caught up in their petty problems to look at the large picture. The Colonel of the group, in an effort to get noticed by the Generals, keeps upping the number of missions his men have to fly before their tour of duty is up. Yossarian gets close to the number, and then it gets upped. He is creeping along the edge of insanity trying to do what any animal does by instinct, survive. But survival in this world is more difficult because nothing makes sense. A colonel plans a mission in order to get casualties so he can demonstrate his compassion in the letters that get sent home to the soldier’s family.

Although I could go into the eccentricities of the style of the book, I will avoid that. Those eccentricities, whether you like them or not, cannot be separated from the subject matter have to be accepted. And the subject is worth every odd juxtaposition of phrases, rapid fire scene cuts, and annoying dialogue that is part of the mix. What Joseph Heller is doing in Catch-22 is describing a horrific dystopia, but one we can really believe in. Some of the things described in the book sound vaguely absurd, but more often than not I could easily relate to the situation to our post-war bureaucracies. I mentioned the character Captain Yossarian was suffering in a hell Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, could only imagine. A lot of Catch-22 reminded me of a parody of today’s corporate culture, if everything was taken to the point that death was a very real aspect of failure.

I imagine Captain Yossarian, not as a bombardier within the army, but a corporate mid level executive. When he first starts out, he eagerly takes on his assignments, until the first time one of his decisions causes a personal loss yet yielded the company victory. Eventually, he stops caring about getting the job done right, and starts caring about just getting the job done, thinking if he doesn’t get it right, someone else will. Eventually, all he wants is out of the whole situation, but his bosses keep sending him into the fray. At any point in time, he will be one of the losses that the company doesn’t care about so long as they meet their bottom line. And the bottom line isn’t what everyone thinks it is. The bottom line isn’t profits. Each senior executive has a different bottom line. One wants good PR, anything that shines a good light on the company is success. Another wants the company to seem really busy, so he keeps creating meaningless work for people to do. One manager wants control over another department, so he keeps finding reasons to perform audits. When the manager of that department complains, the first manager says he is only trying to strengthen the company and weed out inefficiencies and anyone opposed to weeding out inefficiencies is obviously opposed to a strong company. Finally, between the cracks of the different agendas the work does get done. A mailroom clerk that everyone thinks is a loyalist to the company, willing to do anything for the company, but is a slacker of sorts, controls the destiny of the generals in the war by controlling the mail, stopping it, redirecting it, or losing it as it suits his personal desires. He is the most powerful person in the entire operation.

Catch-22 influenced our culture to an amazing degree. The very title has become a common accepted phrase within the language. The movie and long running television series M*A*S*H owes a lot to Catch-22 for its portrayal of war. Characters who act insane in order to get out of combat and others who are insane who would never even dream of asking to avoid death. Hawkeye Pierce and Yossarian share many common characteristics. Both are very willing to play the coward to avoid death -- Pierce hiding behind Hotlips to avoid being shot, Yossarian running to the hospital pretending to be sick to avoid missions. Both are highly capable at their job -- Pierce is a surgeon of extreme talent, Yossarian is a skilled bombardier. The comparison between the two works does not end there. In Catch-22, there is a C.I.D. man who is investigating a case of forgeries who tells everyone he is a C.I.D. man but swears them to secrecy. His bumbling efforts are mimicked well in Colonel Flagg, a man willing to break and re-break his arm to get his man. The person even Generals defer to in Catch-22 is ex-PFC Wintergreen, a soldier of the lowest possible rank who knows everything that is going on and has the ability to make or break the careers of the officers above him, a duty he does not take lightly. To M*A*S*H fans, this is exactly what Radar O’Riley was. Without him the day to day operations would have fallen apart.

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