In the post about “Your 5ish favorite books” there were tons of posts that included Catch-22 as a top choice. Im gonna give this book another shot if you guys say so but I put it down after about 100 pages the first time i tried to read it. I liked the ironic message of the book, but didn’t need it exemplified 10,000 times for me to get it. I remember it was something like “If your sane enough to know that war is crazy then your ok to fight in it. If you think the war is great you must be crazy and then shouldn’t be allowed to fight.” The message is something like that isn’t it? Granted I didn’t give the book my heart and soul, but is there more to the book than jamming repeated examples of that irony down my throat? I find myself getting bored of irony.
The book has many different examples of different kinds of irony.
massive spoilage alert in aisle 3
When the Chief finally dies of pneumonia, it is a different sense than when Milo bombs his own airfield.
spoilage over
I think especially Milo is relevant these days with corporate scandals. The kind of anything-for-a-buck people that seem to be cropping up frequently. Excellent book, but it does take dedication to read it.
kid, how old are you? I’m asking because I’m 33 and I really find that Catch-22 is a priceless work that applies to everything that I encounter.
I tend to agree with Tuckerfan’s implication that Catch-22 can improve with age - the reader’s. The more crazy people you know or have known that are in charge of things the more applicable this book is.
It wouldn’t hurt if you had served in the military either because the people Heller mentions are still there from Milo to Major Major Major Major, but serving isn’t necessary. Yes, generally readers get bogged down a quarter to half way through the book because of its insanity, but that’s part of it. You emerge from that insanity just as someone suffering from it might do. The entire book is a metaphor in that way.
Is it worth another shot? I would definitely recommend it. You might find some levels in it you missed before.
I recommend against returning to any work if you can’t do it fresh. Nothing good comes out of coming back to a book with a weary “I’ll give you one more chance” chip on one’s shoulder.
F’r’instance, I read the LOTR twice in my teen years. The first time, I barely made it through. A couple years later, I did it again–you know, “giving it another chance.” That only cemented how much I hated it.
Curiously enough, I found myself re-reading it about ten years after that, without placing any sort of burden of proof on the tale’s shoulders. It was like reading a new story entirely.
Im 33 as well. It’s not that the message doesn’t apply but rather that I don’t need the exact same message repeatedly illustrated over 300 pages. I’m not saying that this is the case but it seemed that way after the first 100.
Whatever you do, don’t read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged! Take the same message, spread over 1000 pages.
Well, if it doesn’t work for you then that’s okay, move on, there are plenty of other books to try. However, it is possible to juist ‘get off on the wrong foot’ with a book, just like with a person, and sometimes you’ll find that maybe your disaffection the first time round had something to do with your mood at the time, the circumstances, stuff that was going on in your life, and so on.
I think Catch-22 has many, many joys in it. There is a section towards the end (no spoiler) when Yossarian is just walking the streets, witnessing the images of war, which I think is profoundly moving and poignant.
To be sure, the insanity of war and of life in general is a major theme in the novel, and the kind of paradox which is now known as a ‘catch-22’ is one ‘distillation’ of this madness, and Heller refers to it more than once in the novel. But the text is also richly abundant with gags, incredible characters, witticisms, sharp observations, and even (when you manage to keep up) some sort of a plot! In short, it offers many treasures. I hope you can get on with it better the second time.
Two footnotes. The first is to say that if you don’t get on too well with ‘Catch-22’ then you’re not likely to enjoy his follow-up, ‘Something Happened’, which is intentionally slower and more ponderous, although I thought it was a superb achievement. However, you may very well enjoy his third, ‘Good As Gold’, which is far easier to read (and shorter) than either of the first two. It’s punchier, zippier, with lots of cracking gags and terrific writing, and has a more conventional structure (although with Heller, you should never expect the conventional… and I’ll say no more). The dialogue between the hero (Bruce Gold) and his family, or between him and the father of the girl he wants to marry, are devastatingly funny yet wincingly cruel at the same time.
Second footnote. Not long before he died, Heller was asked by a journalist, ‘Are you disappointed that since you wrote Catch-22, you haven’t written anything better?’. To which he replied, ‘No, because nobody else has either’.
(and you mihgt like Heller’s third, often-overlooked novel, ‘Good As Gold’
Also, there’s so much stuff in it that you can get a completely different message reading it again. The first time I read it I thought it was outrageously funny; the second time I thought it was unbelievably sad. YMMV, of course, but it’s definitely worth a second chance.
Also, there’s so much stuff in it that you can get a completely different message reading it again. The first time I read it I thought it was outrageously funny; the second time I thought it was unbelievably sad. YMMV, of course, but it’s definitely worth a second chance.
lawwoot,
Actually besides the sophmoric philosophic tripe, I think Atlas Shrugged is really well plotted though not as good as The Fountainhead.
Oh, don’t get me wrong - I actually like Atlas Shrugged. I’m just commenting on the ‘repeating message’ thing.
The great thing about Catch-22 is the way that Heller makes so many different points through so many different characters. After years of trying, I’ve finally concluded that trying to find a one-sentence summary of the book’s meaning is an exercise in futility, and that that’s a good thing. But whatever you do, promise me that you won’t quit until you’ve at least finished the “Major Major” chapter, which is the most hilarious thing I’ve ever read.
[nitpick]
Wasn’t Closing Time the follow-up to Catch-22?
[/nitpick]
In any case, I didn’t enjoy it as much as Catch-22. Picture This and God Knows, on the other hand, were incredible, IMO.
It’s funny; I had the same problem with the start of Catch-22. The repeated examples Heller used in the opening pages annoyed me too. However, I stuck with it, and was cheering for Yossarian at the end. Definitely a must read.
I’m with Super Gnat on this one. Two reads and two very different feelings.
Of course, now I’m in the Army and I know it’s all true. 
Hi Sublight. Sorry, we’re at cross purposes and I could have been clearer. Something Happened was Heller’s second novel, after Catch-22. But then many, many years later, yes, he published Closing Time which was sort of a Catch-22 sequel. I was using ‘follow-up’ just to mean ‘the one that was published next’.
Ah. Gotcha. I’ve never read Something Happened, but I’d like to give it a try next time I’m shopping for a book.
I first read Catch-22 in Prague 4 years ago at a really, really bad time in my life. I won’t go into details but suffice it to say it involved two horrific tragedies a few months apart, one occuring while I was present. I’m not exaggerating when I say I think I would have gone nuts if I hadn’t read the book.
The funny thing is, it’s really not about war. I mean, it’s about war, but in the same way that Moby Dick is about fish. As the book progresses, it becomes more and more clear that the war is a backdrop to much larger issues; this bizzare existential situation we were born into without explanation, a world where things like war and meaningless tragedy happen at all.
By way of example, one scene comes to mind, where Yosarrian is in the hospital and has for some reason taken the place, and is mistaken for, an italian familiy’s dead son. He has to explain to them that he is dying/dead and say goodbye. Oddly, this is a common nightmare. The dreamer is killed in a war and must go and tell his family that he is dead (Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams has a similar image in “the Tunnel”). The father tells Yossarian, after a goodbye scene both humourous and horrible, that he wants him to give a message to God. He wants to tell him that young men aren’t supposed to die, because he doesn’t think God knows that. It reads like a scathing indictment.
There are other, better scenes in the book that speak on many, many levels when looked at in a certain light , but I don’t want to spoil anything. I can’t blame anyone for not being able to get through a book, I was the same way with LOtR (like Drastic. But if you can stand to pick it up after a good long while, it really does have a lot to offer beyond the obligatory “war is bad” message.
When I started reading Catch-22 a few months ago I had the typical slow start. A lot of it was laugh-out-loud (lol) funny, but for some reason it was hard to keep reading. I stopped for a couple of weeks but then got right back into it and finished it. Now it’s one of my favorite books and I hope to read it once every few years for the rest of my life because I know I’ll get more out of it each time.
And I’ll always remember the line, “I always didn’t say you couldn’t find me guilty.”