One of the most important novels of the Second World War is also the funniest and the saddest, the craziest and the sanest. Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961) is not the first novel to subject war to the merciless eye of the satirist. Jaroslav Hasek's (1883-1923) World War I masterpiece The Good Soldier Schweik can lay claim to that title. But Hasek's novel is entirely comic. It does not explore the dark side of comedy, that point on the emotional spectrum where it merges with tragedy. Its willingness to pursue the absurdity of the life it depicts to its logical, and very dark, conclusion is the distinctive feature of Catch-22.

The famous title, by now familiar to almost everyone, refers in the novel to the air force regulation stating that anyone who willingly continues to fly combat missions is insane and should be sent home, but there's a catch. Take the case of Lieutenant Orr: "Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and, as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane, he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to, but if he didn't want to, he was sane and had to." Or, as the novel's central figure, Yossarian, a veteran flyer of 44 missions, puts it, "That's some catch, that Catch-22." Yossarian's commander, Colonel Cathcart, keeps raising the number needed to be rotated home, thereby invoking another version of catch-22. Yossarian is becoming acutely conscious that the world he lives in is his enemy because it wants him dead: "You have a morbid aversion to dying," an army psychologist tells him, but Yossarian's sense is that morbidity lies in the casual acceptance of death that the war encourages. Early in the novel, the story has a lighter, satirical tone, depicting the military as a mirror of society, with each person scrambling for his place.

The more serious theme of life and death emerges in the final section of the novel, climaxing in the unforgettable scene in which Yossarian confronts the eviscerated body of young Snowden, recalling the last line of Randall Jarrell's (1914-65) powerful poem "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner": "When I died, they washed me out of the turret with a hose." Yossarian, reading "the message in Snowden's entrails," discovers Snowden's secret: "Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window and he'll fall, set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all." The last sentence is derived from Shakespeare's King Lear ("Ripeness is all") and is spoken by Edgar, the good son of Gloucester, who has earned his wisdom by assuming, like Yossarian, the role of a "poor naked wretch"; it is his insanity, like that of Yossarian, that puts him in touch with a deeper wisdom, the reverence for life.

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