Maddy Tung

Book Review: Catch-22

A man is considered insane if he willingly continues to fly perilous combat missions, but if he requests to be relieved from duty, he is considered sane for making said request. This is the ridiculous, inescapable, incomparable Catch-22 law that the book of the same name builds its story around. Catch-22 is a blackly funny read set roughly during WW2 that uses the bombardier Yossarian as a protagonist. Full of anxiety, Yossarian is always attempting to find a way to escape missions because “thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him.” However, Colonel Cathcart is always raising the number of missions one must fly to go home. The conflict in the story is not so black and white as to just include the problems between Yossarian and Colonel Cathcart, though. The story is told through a third person omniscient narrator and there is no real chronological order to the chapters, but as the reader gets deeper into the book, the plot becomes clearer. As well, there is quite a large cast of characters who are eventually all connected to each other in some way or another. Catch-22’s genre is defined as satire. This book probably should be read by mature readers, since it contains mature content, obfuscation, and very long adjectives for effect.