just one catch

it's just one of those things, either you hate it, or you love it. and most people hate it.
Catch 22, i mean.
Here's a bit of history: in 1961 Joseph Heller published Catch 22, amid reviews so wounded and disapproving that it seemed as if critics felt that the author had written the book to spite the world personally. not to repeat myself, but people really, really, seriously hate this book. and, in a way, i can sympathize. the book is utterly repetitive with no proper sense of time. it makes very little sense. there is no clear climax.

And yet I've spent the last week or so rereading it. why? because this book really makes me think. it questions sanity, and insanity in everyday circumstances. in this book, all of the characters have been called crazy by someone at some time. but the really crazy thing is the system. catch 22 is set during world war two, in an American army base in a small island off Italy. the title refers to a rule which says that the only way to get out of flying dangerous missions is to plead insanity, but only the insane will fly the dangerous missions. so therefore if you try and get out of flying the mission you are only being sane, which is exactly what you can't be if you want to get out of flying. this is only one example of how the system makes no sense.

In it's cynical, bitter, rotten center, i think that this book is about war. about how war makes no sense. this is emphasized because it starts out in the hospital of the squadron. it says that there is a much higher casualty rate outside the hospital then in, and about the nurses were irritated because they make people better just to have them go and die.

Heller writes with sarcasm and comedy, but really this is a strangely complete portrait of war. As the main character, Yossarian, asks repeatedly and simply "why are they trying to kill me?" At first this seems ridiculous, because of course hitler and Mussolini and all of the people bombing and shooting and poisining him don't have him personally in mind. but does that make it any better? he is still in danger, and people are still trying to kill him. 'it's nothing personal' is not a good enough excuse to make murder acceptable. nothing is. So why is it so different in war, when the soldiers are killing what to them is an abstract, non-personal force, instead of real people?
when at first this book seems like a muddled mass of madness and chaos, making less sense then alice in wonderland as an interprative dance, it shapes itself into a few big ideas about life and the lack thereof, and The Horror Of It All.

One question especially lingers in my mind. why is it so much easier to want to kill someone you can't see? Why does anonnimity make slaughter seem morally sound?