synopsis:

'Catch-22', Joseph Heller's best-known work is a satire on war which manages to cram forty odd characters into forty plus pages. In these pages you will meet crazy pilots, a chaplain with doubts, a depressed doctor with a fear of flying, scheming colonels on the make and squabbling generals.

Set during the Second World War Heller's anti-war classic has at its heart one of the great literary anti-heroes of all time – Yossarian.

Heller offers no obvious plot in a conventional sense but does offer a skillfully constructed narrative which follows Yossarian's attempts to stop flying the increasing number of bombing missions imposed on him by his superior officer, Colonel Cathcart. During missions over the cities of Bologna, Ferrara and Avignon Yossarian goes through a number of experiences which convinces him that he must do anything to escape from the war.

He begins to act crazy – walking around naked for example, receiving a medal as nature intended. But there's a catch here – Catch-22 - which specifies that because Yossarian understands the insanity around him then he's sane enough to carry on flying. The book follows that dilemma of Yossarian until its final pages. In the narrow sense, catch-22it is the "catch" that keeps Yossarian and the others in the war: If a soldier acts irrationally he has to be sent home, but if he asks to be sent home and therefore out of danger, he is acting rationally and therefore ineligible to get out of the fighting... More broadly, catch-22 is a metaphor for the ordinary person caught up in the madness of war or modern social life in general.

on this book:

'Catch-22's central idea - that real life is crazier than insanity - remained with Heller in his subsequent, but less successful novels. Heller held a deep mistrust of authority and bureaucracy, and treated the government, religion, the military, and the world of big business with equal contempt. Many of his works were devoted to showing those in charge as arrogant idiots.'Catch-22' is generally referred to as an antiwar novel, but Heller's criticisms extend beyond the absurdity of war to capitalism itself and the social relations that arise from it. his analysis is at times confused, and is often directed at surface elements while neglecting more fundamental issues. Nonetheless, 'Catch-22' stands as a strong protest against the conditions of modern society.