Yossarian’s expedient is not very flattering to our national ideals, being defeatist, selfish, cowardly, and unheroic. On the other hand, it is one of those sublime expressions of anarchic individualism without which all national ideals are pretty hollow anyway. Since the mass State, whether totalitarian or democratic, has grown increasingly hostile to Falstaffian irresponsibility, Yossarian’s antiheroism is, in fact, a kind of inverted heroism which we would do well to ponder. For, contrary to the armchair pronouncements of patriotic ideologues, Yossarian’s obsessive concern for survival makes him not only not morally dead, but one of the most morally vibrant figures in recent literature—and a giant of the will beside those wary, wise, and wistful prodigals in contemporary novels who always accommodate sadly to American life. I believe that Joseph Heller is one of the most extraordinary talents now among us. He has Mailer’s combustible radicalism without his passion for violence and self-glorification; he has Bellow’s gusto with his compulsion to affirm the unaffirmable; and he has Salinger’s wit without his coquettish self-consciousness. Finding his absolutes in the freedom to be, in a world dominated by cruelty, carnage, inhumanity, and a rage to destroy itself, Heller has come upon a new morality based on an old ideal, the morality of refusal. Perhaps—now that Catch-22 has found its most deadly nuclear form—we have reached the point where even the logic of survival is unworkable. But at least we can still contemplate the influence of its liberating honesty on a free, rebellious spirit in this explosive, bitter, subversive, brilliant book.
NELSON ALGREN (1909–1981) advanced Catch-22’s grassroots popularity in the Midwest with an influential assessment of the novel’s staying power in the June 23, 1962, issue of the Chicago Daily News. Algren’s abiding love of outsiders and nonconformists and his hatred of corruption made him an early fan of Catch-22; the following review presented his first assessment of the novel in the November 4, 1961, issue of The Nation.
The Catch
by Nelson Algren
There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. 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 would have to fly more missions. He would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause and let out a respectful whistle:
“That’s some catch, that Catch-22,” he observed.
“It’s the best there is,” Doc Daneeka agreed.
Yossarian was moved deeply day and night and what moved him more deeply than anything else was the fact that they were trying to murder him.
“Who’s ‘they’?” Clevenger wanted to know. “Who, specifically, is trying to murder you?”
“Every one of them,” Yossarian told him.
“Every one of whom?”
“Every one of whom do you think?”
“I haven’t any idea.”
“Then how do you know they aren’t?”
Yossarian had proof, because strangers he didn’t know shot at him with cannons every time he flew up into the air to drop bombs on them, so it was of no use for Clevenger to say “No one is trying to kill you.”
“Then why are they shooting at me?”
“They’re shooting at everyone.”
“And what difference does that make?”
“I’m not going to argue with you,” Clevenger decided, “you don’t know who you hate.”
“Whoever is trying to poison me.”
“Nobody is trying to poison you.”
“They poisoned my food twice, didn’t they? Didn’t they put poison in my food at Ferrara and during the Great Big Siege of Bologna?”
“They put poison in everybody’s food,” Clevenger explained.
“And what difference does that make?”
There was no established procedure for evasive action. All you needed was fear, and Yossarian had plenty of that. He bolted wildly for his life on each mission the instant his bombs were away. When he fufilled the thirty-five missions required of each man of his group, he asked to be sent home.
Colonel Cathcart had by then raised the missions required to forty. When Yossarian had flown forty he asked to be sent home. Colonel Cathcart had raised the missions required to forty-five—there did seem to be a catch somewhere. Yossarian went into the hospital with a pain in his liver that fell just short of being jaundice. If it became jaundice the doctors could treat it. If it didn’t become jaundice and went away they could discharge him. Yossarian decided to spend the rest of the war in bed by running a daily temperature of 101. He had found a catch of his own.