The only thing I could gather when I attempted it in high school was that the main character is a man named Yossarian who is a pilot in WW2 and really doesn't like his superiorsIt felt like a bunch of sketches about schizos in the military instead of a coherent story
>>25039048Okay, but how is the prose?
>it's awful isn't it, that Catch-22™
I thought it was about the comedy and horror of being a participant in a war
>>25039048I felt the same way when I read it the first time. You really need to get 25% of the way in for the lightbulb to go off and things fall into place.
>>25039048i tried to read it and only got to like chapter 5, i got to learn what a "catch-22" really is so i'm happy with that
>>25039048Absurdity of reality. That life has no absolute narrative or moral sense and man's attempt to impose that onto it to a dogmatic extent leads to exactly those horrors signified in human symbology by hell and the devil. Goes hand-in-hand with with the post-war humanist perspective of artists and thinkers like Alan Watts that was common at the time in response to the chaos and relative lack of personal agency of the times they'd just been through. If you're a guy in your 20s-40s who was born into the interwar period, grew up expecting to take part in a given culture and then suddenly all hell breaks loose due to forces acting over your head so much bigger than you the point of no return occurred before you were born, and the world goes through insane shit never before witnessed at such scale and upends the entire content and trajectory of your life with no rhyme or reason past a certain point, your generation is bound to spend the next little while making art figuring in what spirit to appraise life.
>>25039148I like how it gets more and more serious and ends up being sob-worthy poignant. It's a masterpiece of a novel.
>>25039072Breezy Probably the most incredible thing about this book is that Heller wasn't a writer by trade
>>25039048He wasn’t the pilotHe was the bombardierIf you missed that part, then you likely missed much moreI like the book, it’s one of my favorites, but then I read it when I was in the army so it made perfect sense to me
It's subversive. It's basically about how the high ranking military officers of the Allies were worse than the Germans.
>>25040857stunning and brave take
>>25039048I read it as a teenager as well and I've never been more disappointed by a great book. I feel like this book can only be appreciated by boomers, zoomers like myself weren't raised with the appropriate values to appreciate its absurdism. After Vietnam, GWOT, and globalization, how am I supposed to have a visceral reaction to Milo Minderbender's greed or Colonel Cathcart's sociopathic careerism. Because I read it so young there are lines that stick in my vocabulary like calling personal successes "feathers in my cap", but that makes me hate the book even more. I wish I'd been influenced by a better book.
>>25040955This but without the sneering leftoid irony
It took Heller about 11 years to write this novel, and I don't think he edited it much. Yeah, it's a little disjointed.
>>25041844You just sound frail and overly sensitive.
>>25041903You're frail and overly sensitive if the boomerslop anti-war book makes you feel anything more than mild amusement.
I read it awhile back and enjoyed it as a story; some of it's themes have lingered and influenced some of my own thinking/writing.I find it strange -not surprising- that many here approach a novel with the aim of labeling it good/bad, genius or overrated, instead of looking at the author's intention and execution. War is a challenging subject for satire since it represents our greatest capacity for evil and cruelty and the consequences (immediate and downstream) are the most destructive. Not exactly the light fare of airplane food or the latest celeb meltdown. The big question is whether or not War is innate to us, inevitable and as natural as the colour of our eyes or if we can progress beyond our tribal instincts. Each successive generation invents novel reasons and methods to perpetuate conflict...oaths to flags, crowns, new dogmas. if you look through human history, war is the wallpaper; peace is exception. Yossarian is trying to survive the war bodily -just as morally intact. His search for sanity amidst the calamity is foiled by the cynicism, ignorance and ineptitude of his superiors (the Machine).What inspired me to write my own war novel was the idea that Yossarian escapes these increasingly-dangerous bombing runs, only to be (nearly) killed by (Nately 's)whore at the end (spoiler). Originally, my main character (a war correspondent) is blown up by a friendly-fire accident, after surviving many close scapes on the battlefield. The last chapter of the book was to be an epic poem/fever dream that emerges from his fractured mind, while in recovery. I ran with that for awhile, but then decided that it would be better to shift the narration to a young conscript, and have the journalist as a character in the narrative. Through an unfortunate set of circumstances, the conscript and the correspondent have to team up to survive and the third act is a Rick&Morty-type debate on the many historical and contemporary questions of War's totemic power.Free copies for everyone just as soon as it gets past the censor...
>>25041901stunning and brave
Anyone read Closing Time? Enjoyed Catch-22 very much, but CT just felt like a meandering pile of shit with too many plot points and callback to 22 that don't really amount to anything. There was this part where an old dude complains how his friends keep joking about his wives huge tits, which is pretty cool I guess.
>>25039048I didn’t like it. I tried reading it and got about halfway through, but the author’s style irritated me and I found the book’s overall thesis not terrible interesting as a novel so I never finished it.
>>25039048durr it doesnt matter durr im so quirky and postmodern durr im a boomer arent interesting durr
I didn't find it that difficult to read or follow, but then again I have a high school diploma.
>>25041902On the contrary, it's impressive how all the disparate threads tie together. It's a painstakingly-structured book.
>>25039072Pretty overwrought t.b.h. It's self-evidently a first novel. Still entertaining thoughbeit.
>>25042138>believing the catch 22 is the main theme of the novelYou got filtered and you deserve it.
>>25039048I became obsessed with this book in the 6th grade and read it cover to cover at least four times. Think it was a malign influence though, getting an 11 year old to think ‘everything is bullshit lmao” is probably not good for him
>>25039048It’s really good and then it tricked me into reading ‘Something Happened’ and that book was no good at al
