I read this book for the first time before I understood much about adult life, when I was 13. This time around every licentious comment, bureaucratic breakdown and gruesome death made me smile, laugh or cringe. Yossarian challenged my English vocabulary with words such as cabalistic, saturnalia and callipygous. Catch-22 will help you prepare for any standardized test with a verbal section on it.
I want to share a section that I found particularly striking. I recently went on a road trip from Saint Louis to New Orleans and back, passing through Memphis, Jackson, and Baton Rouge on the way. That's one reason that the continuing racial segregation, economic disparities and social ills of our country are on my conscience. Heller expresses my own doubts and frustrations more eloquently than I.
"A boy in a thin shirt and thin tattered trousers walked out of the darkness on bare feet. The boy had black hair and needed a haircut and shoes and socks. His sickly face was pale and sad. His feet made grisly, soft, sucking sounds in the rain puddles on the wet pavement as he passed, and Yossarian was moved by such intense pity for his poverty that he wanted to smash his pale, sad, sickly face with his fist and knock him out of existence because he brought to mind all the pale, sad, sickly children in Italy that same night who needed haircuts and needed hoes and socks. He made Yossarian think of cripples and of cold and hungry men and women, and of all the dumb, passive, devout mothers with catotonic eyes nursing infants outdoors that same night with chilled anial udders bared insensibly to that same raw rain. Cows. Almost on cue, a nursing mother padded past holding an infant in black rags, and Yossarian wanted to smash her too, because she reminded him of the barefoot boy in the thin shirt and thin, tattered trousers and of all the shivering, stupefying misery in t a world that never yet had provided enough heat and food and justice for all but an ingenious and unscrupulous handful. What a lousy earth! He wondered how many people were destitute that same night even in his own prosperous country, how many homes were shanties, how many hubands were drunk and wives socked, and how many children were bullied, abused or abandoned. How many families hungered for food they could not afford to buy? How many hearts were broken? How many suicides would take place that same night, how many people would go insane? How many cockroaches and landlords would triumph? How many winners were losers, successes failures, rish men poor men? How many wise guys were stupid? How many happy endings were unhappy endings? How many honest men were liars, brave men cowards, loyal men traitors, how many sainted men were corrupt, how many peopl in positions of trust had sold their souls to blackguards for petty cash, how many had never had souls? How many straight-and-narrow paths were crooked paths? How many best families were worst families and how many good people were bad people? When you added them all up and then subtracted, you might be left with only the children, and perhaps with Albert Einstein and an old violinist or sculptor somewhere." (Heller, Chapter 39, THE ETERNAL CITY)
I wonder if Bob Dylan read this book and was similarly affected by "how many how many how many" theme.
There are many powerful discourses between characters. Heller uses satire with in a restrained and effective manner that lets me take him seriously.
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