Catch-22
by Joseph Heller
Summary
Captain John Yossarian, a B-25 bombardier stationed on the island of Pianosa off the Italian coast during the Second World War, spends the novel trying every available angle to be grounded from flying more combat missions, only to keep discovering that the army's own logic guarantees he never can. The catch that gives the book its title is circular: a man who wants to stop flying dangerous missions is behaving sanely and must therefore keep flying, since only a request from someone genuinely insane would qualify for grounding, and no one who understood the danger enough to ask would count as insane. Heller tells the story out of chronological order, circling back repeatedly to the death of a gunner named Snowden, whose spilled secret, that man is matter and matter does not last, sits at the emotional center of an otherwise absurdist, joke driven book. After Yossarian learns that his friend Orr has secretly rowed a life raft all the way to neutral Sweden following a plane crash he deliberately engineered, Yossarian resolves to desert and follow him there himself, the novel ending on that fragile, half comic escape rather than on any battlefield resolution.
Heller builds much of the book from repeated, escalating absurdities, the same bureaucratic non sequitur returning with a darker edge each time, and it reads as broad, aggressive comedy for long stretches before the war's real cost breaks through in scenes like Snowden's death. That whiplash between farce and horror is the book's whole method, and it is exactly what split its first reviewers.
Simon and Schuster published the novel on October 10, 1961, after Heller spent roughly eight years writing it, drawing on his own service as a bombardier flying sixty combat missions over Europe.
Historical Context & Significance
Catch-22 was a finalist for the 1962 National Book Award for fiction, losing to Walker Percy's debut novel The Moviegoer. Reviews at the time split hard: The Nation called it the best novel to come out in years, and the New York Herald Tribune praised it as a wild, moving, shocking and exhilarating roller coaster, while The New Yorker complained that it did not even seem to be written so much as shouted onto paper.
Early hardcover sales were modest, roughly twelve thousand copies by Thanksgiving 1961, but the paperback found the audience the hardcover had not: 1.1 million copies sold between September 1962 and April 1963 alone, helped by word of mouth on college campuses; later, during the Vietnam War, readers heard their own war reflected in Yossarian's bureaucratic nightmare. The book has sold more than ten million copies since, entered the language through its own title, and inspired both a 1970 film starring Alan Arkin and a 2019 Hulu miniseries directed and executive produced by George Clooney, neither of which has displaced the novel's own reputation as the book that gave English a phrase for an impossible situation with no way out.