Word: yossarianic
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...YOSSARIAN (into mike, yelling...
...YOSSARIAN (into mike, yelling...
...experience was too extravagant to be fiction and too real to be borne. Heller furnished the corpse with a vaudeville wardrobe, mixed in '50s America, and called his novel Catch-22. Black, mad and surreal, it told of a bombardier named Yossarian impaled on the insanity of war and struggling to escape. Undergraduates still see Yossarian as a lionly coward, the first of the hell-no-we-won't-go rebels who had to go anyway. To them, the book's final sentence limns the human condition as well as the hero's: "The knife came down, missing...
Catch-22 smacked of Restoration comedy. The characters trapped with Yossarian in the 256th Squadron had arch names: Major Major, General Dreedle, Colonel Korn, Milo Minderbinder. The contents seemed to be a series of hyperbolic World War II anecdotes, but its author confesses: "I wrote it during the Korean War and aimed it for the one after that." The book was criticized as flatulent, self-indulgent and anachronistic?"Engine Charlie" Wilson's General Motors, thinly disguised, was one of its archvillains. Moreover it followed Hilaire Belloc's irritating dictum: "First I tell them what I am going to tell them...
...biggest, of course, is Yossarian. Like most larger-than-death heroes, he is everyman. Still, some men are more Yossarian than others. Mike Nichols knows. And Alan Arkin knows. And Mike Nichols knows that Alan Arkin knows. "It was the only part I've ever worked on which didn't demand a conception," says Arkin, "because there isn't much difference between me and Yossarian." Viewing Arkin in the film of Catch-22 is like watching Lew Alcindor sink baskets or Bobby Fischer play chess. The man seems made for the role. Fear rides on his back like a schizoid...