Catch-22

Catch-22 explores the senselessness of war. Yossarian and the other airmen are caught in the midst of a war that makes no sense to them. They are confronted daily by absurd bureaucracy and meaningless violence. With the enemy almost defeated and the goals of the war vague, the men are engaged in an empty, facile pursuit in which the commanders care only about petty disputes and promotions. Scheisskopf has his parades, Peckem has his bombing patterns, and Cathcart has his desperate desire to be noticed. All three commanders direct missions in which men die, but none of them are invested in actually winning the war. Instead, it is the commanding officers’ vapid pursuits that direct the men’s fates. Even Peckem’s concept of “bomb patterns” is a meaningless (and massively fatal) joke to amuse one man. This senselessness is compounded by the narrative’s nonlinear structure, in which there is no discernable progress and the missions meander Italy without advancement. Every supposed victory is tinged with defeat and death because the war has no actual objective. Similarly, the men never encounter any enemy because their real enemy is the high command. In the war, nothing makes sense, and the only achievements are trauma, pain, and death.