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Chronology in Catch- 22 How does the disordered, tangential presentation of events affect the flow of the story? What devices does Heller employ to allow the reader to piece together the order of events? What kind of unified narrative, if any, ultimately emerges? What does this portrayal says about the idea of time in Catch 22?
Men went mad and were rewarded with medals. (12). War is absurd and insane. Thats what Hellers Catch-22 is about. The author himself was a soldier in 1942, at age 19, he joined the U.S. Army Air Corps.1 Heller tells his story in a way most soldiers do when they talk about the time they have spent in the army. They do that inconsistently but with deep emotion. In such stories time flows according to a subjective significance of events and that reveals the authors attitude towards the war and the military. It is a waste of time being in the army but wartime is a loss of lives and time, of friends and dreams. Hellers novel shows his own consciousness for the frantic nature of war and he pours out his attitude by means of words in a sensuous and psychological narration. Almost every soldiers story begins with some wise trick to show the great wits of the hero. And in Catch- 22 it is the Yossarians stay in the hospital. He deceives the doctors and the nurses for being ill and enjoys the good conditions while the other soldiers are on fight. Such a beginning of a story must provide that the hero is smart enough to survive in any time of trouble and even in the most somber time the wartime. Yossarian, the protagonist, is completely satisfied with food and bed:The food wasn't too bad, and his meals were brought to him in bed.(p.4) But he is affected by the monotony in the hospital and the duty he is obliged to do there seems to him boring and he starts to break that monotony by inventing different ways to do his official job. Most of them are strange and offensive but he does them although that seems horrible. He is supposed to censor letters but: He reached a much higher plane of creativity the following day when he blacked out everything in the letters but *a, an* and *the*.(p.5) That feat is mean and indecent but it shows the stupid power of the officer. He boasts with such acts in the beginning of the story for to escape of being assumed miserable. But he is somehow as the war itself is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Heller

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Further on the story will become a whimper that is brimmed over with complains about the missions he has to finish for to be exempted from his military service. He constantly counts his number of flights and waits for the day when he will be discharged. But there comes the absurd catch 22. That catch does not allow soldiers to escape from their military service by various ways. And that catch concerns different situations and really catches the soldiers in the grip of the wartime. So the time for them stops to flow by seconds and days but by the missions and the insanities of the war. Although they count their flights and do reach the necessary number there always will be a new order to increase the sufficient ones. Some soldiers will go crazy and some will get used to the situation but there will be no escape. And for that reason all will be infected with some kind of madness and courage. Orr, a bomber pilot in Yossarians squadron who is considered crazy will not ask to be grounded but will fight:Because he's crazy... He has to be crazy to keep flying combat missions after all the close calls he's had. Sure, I can ground Orr. But first he has to ask me to.(Doc Daneeka, p.39) But Orr will not be the only crazy in the war, Yossarian will go mad too. He will be naked on a tree and will watch the funeral of Snowden who has been shot fatally during a flight in the presence of Yossarian. That scene of a naked man in the tree and a going on procession will mystify the decent Chaplain Tappman: Had the naked man in the tree at Snowden's funeral been merely a hallucination? Or had it been a true revelation? The chaplain trembled at the mere idea. (p.188) The minister of the religion moves now in the eternity. And that is the eternity of an absurd world. A world that is full of mere aggression and meaningless death. What does do a pastor among the killers? He hunts for their souls but finally he becomes a victim. He mingles in the crowd of insane and vicious creatures. The time for the Chaplain has stopped. But time has different value for any one. It is useless for a crazy man like Milo, the one who bombs his own squadron. It is most important for him to run his own business. For Milo time is money although his deals are absurd. He even deals with the enemy:The arrangements were fair to both sides. Since Milo did have freedom of passage everywhere, his planes were able to steal over in a sneak attack without alerting the German antiaircraft gunners; and since Milo knew about the attack, he was able to alert the German antiaircraft gunners in sufficient time for them to begin firing

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accurately the moment the planes came into range. It was an ideal arrangement for everyone but the dead man in Yossarian's tent, who was killed over the target the day he arrived. (p.233) Time is endless and of no importance for the military bureaucracy. And that killed man stays in the tent of Yossarian from the very beginning and is not even attached to the squadron. For that poor body time has stopped too. Its presence reminds the others that there is a possible end of their lives but there is no end of the absurd. Yossarian yields to such a threat and decides to make a final attempt to escape from his wartime duty. He refuses to fly but is to face the courtmartial: Yossarian marched backward with his gun on his hip and refused to fly any more missions. (p.361) He makes a deal with the Colonels: The deal I made with Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Korn. They'll let me go home a big hero if I say nice things about them to everybody and never criticize them to anyone for making the rest of the men fly more missions. Later he will realize that deal as mean and ugly: But why, Yossarian? It's a very good deal they're offering you. It's a lousy deal, Danby. It's an odious deal.(p.408) Full of hatred and despair Yossarian decides to desert. There will be no heroism in his story but he does not need it. His aim is to escape the hell which suffocates him from the very beginning. He makes his plan, shares it with his mates and starts to realize it: I'm going to run away,' Yossarian announced in an exuberant, clear voice, already tearing open the buttons of his pajama tops.(p.418) He wont stop. He must feel the freedom, the time and the world again. And Yossarian jumped. Thus ends the story of a clever and skillful officer, a man who had realized the absurdity of the military feats and who cherished the life of a free man. The units of time in his story are the most significant and the strongest moments in his military service. They dont pass as seconds, or minutes, they appear in the story like the bombs which he had thrown over the battlefield, in a desperate, unusual and inconsistent way. His story flows as a stream of his own consciousness diseased and not heroic. Hellers novel is a postmodern vision on the war and it focuses on the absurd in the army where there is no reasonable event and the life there is full of desperation, pain, humiliation and heartless bureaucracy.

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WORKS USED FOR THE ANALYSIS: Catch-22,Joseph Heller, (a pdf copy found on the internet) -22, (chitanka.info)

Time Structure in Catch-22, DOUG GAUKROGER,UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO, ONTARIO Wikipedia.org