Catch-22, which introduced the phrase into the English language, states a seemingly logical proposition that is really contradictory and self-defeating: The World War II American bomber and protagonist Yossarian must be crazy to put himself at risk by flying dangerous missions, yet if he tries to excuse himself from duty, he is proven sane and therefore cannot be relieved. It’s a laughable setup that Heller uses to great comic effect. He also clearly enjoys satirizing all kinds of deserving military characters, mowing them down like a trigger-happy turret-gunner. Catch-22 offers a wide cast of characters and situations, too many to keep straight, and a narrative that is also hard to keep track of at times. His language can be turgid too. It’s hard to read a line like “His globular, exophthalmic eyes were quite distraught” without groaning. That’s easily forgotten by some breathtakingly vivid descriptions of bombing missions, written by a firsthand witness as a WWII bombardier flying missions out of Corsica over Italy. There is also the sheer audacity and funniness of Heller’s situations, to say nothing of the characters who seem too outrageous to be true but in the theatre of war appear quite normal. There is Major Major who, after becoming a major, becomes Major Major Major. He looks like Henry Fonda and does an amazing job of avoiding coming into contact with anyone. Milo Minderbinder is a mess officer and one-man “syndicate” who deals with the enemy to fatten his own trading enterprise and ends up with the problem of chocolate covered Egyptian cotton. The late Christopher Hitchens, in a short essay at the end of this 50th anniversary of the 1961 classic novel, finds echoes in this crazy plot with that of Oliver North, who was caught up in a similar Iran contra arms scheme. (Life imitating art?) We have the soldier Mudd who was supposed to share Yossarian’s tent but died in combat before he could be registered. The army doesn’t recognize this “unknown soldier who never had a chance” and so officially it isn’t clear if there even is a Mudd (pun intended). Colonel Cathcart, Yossarian’s nemesis who keeps increasing the number of missions bombardiers must fly before they can be sent home, virtually ensuring they never get out alive, is a “slick, successful, slipshod, unhappy man of thirty-six who lumbered when he walked and wanted to be a general.” Doc Daneeka is afraid to fly because “in an airplane there was absolutely no place in the world to go except to another part of the airplane." He is declared dead from a mission that he didn’t participate in and his war widow reaps the benefits, refusing to believe his telegrams that he’s alive. We have a mysterious “soldier in white” who is encased in bandages in a hospital and may or may not be dead, may or may not be even inside the bandages. We have crazy prostitutes, a lusty nurse and photographer and at least one decent character, Chaplain Tappman. Heller introduces him in the first line of the novel by writing how “It was love at first sight” from the time Yossarian saw the chaplain “and fell madly in love with him.” So many situations, so many madmen and women, so much goddamned funny stuff. Problem is, war isn’t funny. It’s hell. And through your tears of laughter, Heller forces your eyes open to what hell looks like, where men fly “through swollen masses of new and old bursts of flak like rats racing in a pack through their own droppings.” Hell is especially vivid as the novel draws to a conclusion where Yossarian witnesses a host of horrors on the streets of Rome. It’s as if he left the pages of this novel and entered one of Dante’s circles of hell. The solution to Yossarian’s Catch-22 is perhaps the weakest part of the novel, as critic Robert Brustein points out in another essay. But it doesn’t mar Heller’s lampooning of a military bureaucracy and the foolishness of war. The author dishes it all out along with a message to those who, like Yossarian, find themselves getting tripped up in Catch-22. It’s that Catch-22 doesn’t exist, as the hero finds out, “but it made no difference. What did matter was that everyone thought that it existed, and that was much worse, for there was no object or text to ridicule or refute, to accuse, criticize, attack, amend, hate, revile, spit at, rip to shreds, trample upon or burn up.” Catch-22 is a wonderfully funny and jarring big bang of a book that keeps banging like an ammo belt tossed into a fire. It’s also wonderfully humane and Yossarian’s desperate attempt to survive and do right is noble. Near the end, Major Danby advises him to keep his values although “people are sometimes not so good.” Yossarian rejects the advice: “When I look up, I see people cashing in. I don’t see heaven or saints or angels. I see people cashing in on every decent impulse and every human tragedy.” There’s nothing funny about that.