That's some catch, that Catch-22

This is a reread, I read it as my choice from a list of options for our final project in AP Lit (twelfth grade English), where it was by far more enjoyable than everything else on the syllabus that year combined. The prosody of the end is lovely and has stuck with me, so I figured I'd revisit it.

Knowing what to expect (most of the book is out of chronological order, you can piece it together but it doesn't really matter, the end when it drops the nonlinear stuff is also when the mood whiplash to horror hits) made it less of a roller coaster. (The edition I checked out had a bunch of essays/commentary at the end, including a very detailed spreadsheet that Heller used to keep track of characters and their chronological plots!)

I guess the parts that I'd forgotten are 1. some of the "twists" are not actually twists in that they're essentially spelled out pretty early on, and 2. even the sympathetic characters who get screwed over by the system can also be total jerks (Doc Daneeka has a constant routine of "you're telling me about your troubles? what about me?"; Yossarian and Dunbar grope and harass nurses in the hospital, and I don't think that's entirely supposed to be values dissonance, even if it somewhat is).

-There are creepy ominous people harassing the chaplain in the basement. A psychiatrist interprets Yossarian's mentions of Dunbar as a shadow self: "I'll bet Dunbar is that evil fellow who really does all those nasty things you’re always being blamed for, isn’t he?” And the bizarre illogic that nevertheless makes its own internal sense...what does the Wayside School kid to Catch-22 adult pipeline look like?

-I normally am not a big fan of Good Feels Good/Evil Cannot Comprehend Good tropes, sometimes it feels too easy to have people just enjoy being empathetic without sacrificing anything. But especially recently, in twisted/dystopian settings, there can be thoughtful portrayals of "maybe the bad guys are just angry all the time because they resent the good guys having integrity."

There were many strange things taking place, but the strangest of all, to Clevinger, was the hatred, the brutal, uncloaked, inexorable hatred of the members of the Action Board, glazing their unforgiving expressions with a hard, vindictive surface, glowing in their narrowed eyes malignantly like inextinguishable coals.

Compare "The Master and Margarita": "There was something uncommonly fake and uncertain in every line of these articles, despite their threatening and self-assured tone. I kept thinking—and I couldn’t rid myself of the thought—that the authors of these articles weren’t saying what they wanted to say, and that that was why they were so furious."

I'm not calling myself a paragon of bravery, or anything, I'm a very quiet and conflict-averse person. But man, it isn't hard just to keep your mouth shut sometimes rather than say things you don't believe! I'd be angry too!

Edit to add: this part was too real. (Cathcart is the terrible officer who keeps trying to raise the number of missions required, because he wants his squadron to be famous for "his" bravery and get his name in the Saturday evening post.)

Colonel Cathcart was impervious to absolutes. He could measure his own progress only in relationship to others, and his idea of excellence was to do something at least as well as all the men his own age who were doing the same thing even better. The fact that there were thousands of men his own age and older who had not even attained the rank of major enlivened him with foppish delight in his own remarkable worth; on the other hand, the fact that there were men of his own age and younger who were already generals contaminated him with an agonizing sense of failure and made him gnaw at his fingernails with an unappeasable anxiety that was even more intense than Hungry Joe’s.

I've definitely been guilty of this and hopefully this is a good reality check, because nobody wants to be Cathcart.