Word: yossarianic
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Keith Mano's concern, however, is not with polemics or politics. He is absorbed, instead, by two seemingly antithetical characters: Jones, a disgruntled, cowardly medic who is a cranky version of Catch-22's manic Yossarian, and the patrol leader, Sergeant Hook, whose claw is a spiritual but deadlier version of Captain Hook's famous iron hand...
...play a role in Catch-22, Scott declined-with emphasis. "I'd already played that character once when I did Buck Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove. But even if I hadn't done Strangelove, I wouldn't have been in Catch-22. I think the hero, Yossarian, is the biggest cop-out there ever was. What the hell good does it do to take your clothes off, climb a tree and refuse to come down? What kind of rebellion is that...
...youthful flaws. Both illusive and allusive, it is often ultra-literary in just the wrong sort of way-full of echoes from the author's literary heroes, T. S. Eliot, Proust and Truman Capote. There are also resonances from Joseph Heller. One can imagine Heller's Captain Yossarian, sitting up there in the sky, cursing the night, as the U.S. Air Force drops a bomb in the garden that Arlecq recollects from his own childhood. "It is still a good eight weeks till Easter," Fries writes, "but Arlecq's uncle in America has sent this early Easter...
Military Jujitsu. Professional patriots have always been fair game for satire but few books have ever given them a lustier Bronx cheer than Joseph Heller's sprawling, farcical Catch-22. Yossarian, the Air Corps bombardier who doesn't want to fly any more missions for the mordantly sane reason that he might get killed, is a comic creation that has already become something of a classic. In typical black-humor fashion, Yossarinan's real adversary is nothing less than the whole mad, mucked-up system, the jujitsu with which the bombardier repeatedly sets the system...
...half-grown rhinoceros. The author seems only occasionally and precariously in control of this jabberwock of a book, but since Catch-22 is a wild war satire, it does not much matter that the book tramples what scenery it does not chew. The novel's hero is Yossarian, an Air Force captain whose maladjustment is that he is sane. He is stationed in Italy and has flown 40 or 50 missions, and he tries to explain to a friend what troubles him about this: "They're trying to kill me." No one is trying to kill...