The Absurd Hero Yossarian
The date: October 1838. The place: Veracruz, Mexico. King Louis-Philippe of France demands six hundred thousand pesos from Mexico for repairs to a pastry shop that was damaged more than ten years prior during a military coup in Mexico City. Mexico refuses to pay the inordinate sum and King Louis-Philippe decides to launch a full assault on the Gulf Coast. The Pastry War crashes on the Gulf Coast in the form of a French fleet, all over a middling pastry shop. Wars are absurd: the reasons they start, the ways they are fought, and the human cost. They are a function in which human lives become statistics and a loss of a thousand men can be considered an unfortunate consequence of a successful battle. The brave men and women that risk their lives for their countries are just that: valiant people with a sense of higher purpose. But they are also willingly giving up their free choice and guarantee of safety for immeasurable concepts like liberty and justice. However, Yossarian from Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 is not a brave soldier. His actions are motivated by fear. It seems that everybody in the squadron is colluding against him to construct the most absurd environment and inane flight requirements to bar his return home. Yossarian is swimming in the thick of it all, yet he always remains a degree or two separated from the madness, an aloof warrior whose disconnection may be the thing that saves him. Trapped in the irrational military structure of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, John Yossarian’s actions during the war and his final decision prove that he is an absurd hero.
“‘What is a country? A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can’t all be worth dying for,’” (Heller 247). This line, uttered by an old man in Rome, provides the foundation for Yossarian’s thoughts about the war and fighting for a country. To Yossarian the whole idea of war is absolutely ridiculous. He is being asked to risk his life forty, then fifty, then sixty times in order to win a fight he doesn’t understand, to preserve values he can’t quantify. Sometimes he is asked to fly missions that don’t even pertain to the American cause, like the missions he must fly for Milo’s syndicate. Hundreds of meaningless pieces of paper administered by Captain Black prove Loyalty and “duty is owed to vague abstractions as patriotism and free enterprise,” (Kennard 276). Yossarian cannot accept this, how could he? This is a man that cannot comprehend why anybody would simply march in a parade if it doesn’t offer monetary rewards or class privileges.
The entire military structure presented in Catch-22 is overbearing and cumbersome, which results in a tangled mess of rules, regulations and laws that attempt to separate the soldier from his personality. In other words, the military will do whatever illogical thing it has to in order to create an efficient fighting force that hits all the bomb patterns for photographs. Authority is impossible to question, as the very authority that needs to be questioned holds the power to court martial. It is this circular reasoning “that says what it commands is right because it is commanded, and the illogical must be done because the command says it is logical,” (Olderman 229). This is the same circular reasoning that creates the structure that attempts to deny soldiers of what make them human, and “when the system denies you your self, the effect may be as close to death as is comfortable with the retained powers of motion,” (Tanner 87). Yossarian’s ultimate goal is to stay alive, so he finds ways to become detached from the bizarre system in which he is placed. Detached from a system in which a soldier’s extremities do not even belong to that soldier: “‘it certainly is not your leg!’ Nurse Cramer retorted. ‘That leg belongs to the U. S. government,’” (Heller 292).
The absurdity of the situation is sometimes actually funny. In the scramble to find out what has happened to Dunbar in the hospital, Yossarian overhears that they are going to “disappear” him. The reader is left thinking the same thing as Yossarian, “It doesn’t make sense. It isn’t even good grammar. What the hell does it mean when they disappear somebody?” and this connection allows for a good laugh while still commenting on a serious issue (Heller 367). The hospital has just erased the existence of a human being and Yossarian is the only one concerned with this, demonstrating how Yossarian is able to see through the absurdity and think clearly. Catch-22 often glosses over deaths, which scares Yossarian, because to him, death is the only thing worth avoiding at all costs, especially a meaningless one. But “Joseph Heller is talking about the real world, where the fact of death, always inescapable, is made even more horrifying in that men are asked to die for something that, simply translated, means other men’s ambitions and greed,” (Nelson 98). These other men include the obvious Colonel Cathcart and General Dreedle, but they also include other men who hold a different kind of power, specifically economic.
Milo Mindbender is one of the most intriguing characters in the novel, and his syndicate demonstrates a great deal of absurdity. When talking about the syndicate, everybody is involved, including the enemy. When Yossarian steps way out of line to remind Milo “Those are German planes,” Milo takes it to great offense, “‘they are no such thing!’ Milo retorted furiously. ‘Those planes belong to the syndicate, and everybody has a share,’” (Heller 232). Every country and market is represented, resulting in an absurd entangling conflict of interests. It becomes so crazy that Milo is willing to, and does, bomb his own country for the good of the syndicate. And even after being responsible for such atrocious acts “Milo is admired and respected by the American people; even by those who lost loved ones in the bombing” (Waldmeir 66). Milo is responsible for American deaths, and nobody cares because everybody is involved in the syndicate, and when everybody has a share, what’s good for the syndicate is good for the country.
The ultimate level of absurdity in the novel is obviously Catch-22 itself. Catch-22 is an illogical rule that makes it impossible for soldiers to stop flying dangerous missions. In a more abstract sense, “Catch 22 says they have a right to do anything we can’t stop them from doing,” (Heller 407). “They” are the military leadership. They are the Military Police that bring Yossarian back to Pianosa. They are the bureaucratic officers that declare a man, who is standing in front of them and talking, dead. They are the doctors who declare every man sane so that they will have to keep flying. Simply put, “Catch 22 is the untouchable power that has usurped man’s control over his own life and handed it over to an institution which manufactures fatal and inescapable death traps,” (Olderman 228). The death traps are everything that puts Yossarian in danger, not just the missions. Poison in the food, low flying planes, and the stove in his tent are all daily factors that inspire constant fear in Yossarian. And just when a soldier completes his required missions and becomes eligible to go home, Cathcart raises the missions number, not worrying about the men who die almost every time a mission happens. Cathcart even fakes sympathy in order to leverage death for personal gain, at one point he is “so upset by the deaths of Kid Sampson and McWatt that he raised the missions to sixty-five” (Heller 339). He is not a good soldier, a good leader, or a good person, but he has Catch-22 on his side, and that’s all he needs, because “Catch 22 is composed of rules which apparently operate to make it impossible for a man to find a reasonable escape from them” (Kennard 277). In an obviously farcical society, Catch-22 is the shield that protects the king from his constituents, and the manufacturers of the ludicrous from the keepers of free thought.
Everybody in the squadron, barring Yossarian, has accepted this model. Yossarian isn’t everybody, and he certainly is not a nobody, he is simply a body; a body with a mind that fights the constant danger of absurdity.
Yossarian has to live. He does not have to enjoy his time, he does not have to abstract higher meaning, he just has to live. This is his attitude and this is how he survives in the death trap of Pianosa. His philosophy is “that without the living subject there is nothing, nothing, nothing,” (Bryant 228). Therefore he does absolutely everything he can to save his physical body: he freaks out if a drop of his own blood is seen outside its rightful place, he flies miles past the intended target (then ironically receives a medal for it), and he spends weeks in the hospital to avoid physical danger. To Yossarian, “the pleasures of life are purely physical- food, liquor, sex – just as the only real horror is physical pain a death,” (Kennard 276). This is why he is an existential character for most of the book, and this existentialism reprioritizes his life and allows him to become an absurd hero. The old man in Rome speaks on behalf of Yossarian when he corrects Nately, “I’m afraid you have the saying backward. It is better to live on one’s feet than die on one’s knees. That is the way it goes,” (Heller 247). The saying most certainly does not go like that, but this state of thought promotes life over death, thus catering to Yossarian’s perspective. The problem with Pianosa is its small and crowded landscape present challenges to Yossarian no matter where he is and “in his attempt to hold on to his self, he cannot find one safe place but has to have recourse to a mode of motion, he runs and dodges,” (Tanner 89). Just when Yossarian thinks he has found the place to run away to it becomes volatile. For example in the hospital he becomes a vegetable, which at first seems like a preferable and peaceful way to avoid war, but then he contemplates the fate of a vegetable. They either get sliced up for salad, or they rot and are disposed. Yossarian is not interested in either of those options.
Yossarian realizes that the only way to survive is to rise above the absurdity. This is something he ends up being great at. Through his actions he is able to become a well-liked peer and a well-hated subordinate, so much so that to Colonel Cathcart, “the very sight of the name [Yossarian] made him shudder,” (Heller 210). This is because “each of his actions, preposterous, indeed crazy though it might be, is carefully calculated both to protest the absurdity and to get him out of combat,” (Waldmeir 67). One activity that Yossarian enjoys participating in is asking disrupting questions (kind of like myself), “Yossarian was a collector of good questions and had used them to disrupt the educational sessions Clevinger had once conducted two nights a week,” (Heller 34). These simple disruptions give him power, because the leadership cannot trust him to comply with the hierarchy at all times, and this scares the officers. It even seems that “within the framework of the novel, Yossarian cannot be considered a victim of a monolithic system. In fact, he wields more potential power than any other character in the work” (Sniderman 230). This power is “potential” because of his unpredictability. He didn’t care about missions or bomb patterns; “Yossarian was a lead bombardier who had been demoted because he no longer gave a damn whether he missed or not,” he only gives a damn about living through the war, and he is prepared to do that in any possible way (Heller 29). His lack of any attention to detail is exactly contrary to the military value of precision, and he didn’t care. His apathy is the driving force, or lack thereof, behind his actions, and he becomes a weapon against the squadron because he is able to fight the absurdity.
After a while, it becomes evident to Yossarian that surviving off of apathy and fear can be harmful, and he begins to break. The danger of being on the island becomes equivalent to the danger of flying. Whether it’s antiaircraft fire, or Milo bombing his own people, or McWatt buzzing people on the beach, “Yossarian finds himself moving between the threat of a chaotic death in the air and another kind of death among the sinister parodies of pattern on the base,” (Tanner 87). These parodies are the absurd rules of the base: the loyalty oaths, fake reports and Catch-22. With every additional required mission, Yossarian feels the rage of being used for the Colonel’s personal gain and the powerlessness of a simple soldier in his situation, angrily asking “Am I supposed to get my ass shot off just because the colonel wants to be a general?” (Heller 123). This is the anger he feels on the ground, and when he gets in the air he turns this against the pilots who hold his life in their hands. When his plane starts to dip, he immediately takes the situation into his own hands, “Go up,’ Yossarian ordered unmistakably through his teeth in a low, menacing voice. ‘Or I’ll kill you,’” (Heller 333). This is the point where Yossarian breaks, he is willing to put his life above all else, including anybody else’s life. After this incident he begins to rebel, as he realizes the alternatives are unacceptable.
The alternatives are represented by side characters in the book, such as the bandaged void in the hospital. He represents the rotting vegetable, the morbid consequence of remaining still. Every possible route he could take results in death, which is not unusual in war. There are always men dying, but “which men would die was a matter of circumstance, and Yossarian was willing to be a victim of anything but circumstance,” (Heller 68). Yossarian will do anything to make sure he stays alive, and this perceptiveness keeps him above the fog of “an absurd dilemma where he is faced with preposterous alternatives,” (McDonald). Stuck between the clichéd “rock and a hard place,” Yossarian does the unheard of, he stops flying.
From the second Yossarian refuses to fly, his final choice becomes his only choice. Instead of swimming against the current of absurdity, he swims to the riverbank and dries off. While this choice is imminent, it could not be immediate; he has to first test the waters, both figuratively and literally. As the mission quota shoots up to inane amounts, Yossarian “realizes that to use reason in the face of the irrational is futile and that the way out of Catch 22 is simply to rebel,” (Kennard 278). This is not the playful rebellion he had been famous for, but rather flat out insubordination. Yossarian says it best when he says, “I’ve been fighting all along to save my country. Now I’m going to fight a little to save myself…From now on I’m thinking only of me,” (Heller 446). He is fighting for his life, and he becomes the hero he needs to be, the hero that can disrupt the system and remain true to himself. Mr. Bryant conveys this by saying “Yossarian seeks to preserve his authentic self against a suffocating system, Heller carries the defiance against the military hierarchy to its most positive end,” (Bryant 228). Yossarian preserves his true self, his true inner hero, by living to survive and nothing else. His choice to desert is definitely the most extreme form of individual defiance he can achieve, and it presents a noticeable hole in the already thin squadron. He is on an island where certainly almost everybody else is insane, and as a sane man, he “concentrates on the only thing he has: trying to stay alive,” (Nelson 99). At this point in the novel he is fully disobedient and the only thing that might save the squadron is if the leadership can cut a deal with him, but this plan turns out to be rather… odious.
The deal represents an acceptance of the absurdity and contractually obligates Yossarian to remain quiet about the truth. At first Yossarian sees the safe passage home as the ultimate prize, however agreeing to be part the system would not complete his journey as an absurd hero, so his ultimate decision to reject the deal allows him to still escape the absurdity without giving into it. His ultimate choice frees him a great deal, because “if he makes this particular deal, the safety has only the illusion of permanence, for the ‘powers that be’ are not always the same,” (Nelson 100). This means that once the leadership or the military structure changes, Yossarian may still not be safe, and the deal only represents temporary safety. The deal lets him sit out one mission; by not taking it he can sit them all out. It also allows him to remain above the absurdity and not help one of his hated superiors. Yossarian even goes on to say to the Chaplain, “Can you imagine that for a sin? Saving Colonel Cathcart’s life! That’s one crime I don’t want on my record,” (Heller 434). Failing to deliver justice to Cathcart is just as preposterous as not taking the deal, and in Yossarian’s case he still has potential to accomplish his final goal without rewarding his enemies. In doing this he can say that he was not beaten, that he did not give the military what they wanted. This is important to Heller because he believed that “life is possible and man can always find some way to assert the human spirit,” (Olderman 229). It is at this point in the middle of Yossarian’s Kafkaesque “trial” when Yossarian finds out the fate of his hero, Orr. He had not been eaten by sharks or drowned as everybody had suspected, rather he had paddled his way to Sweden. Another true absurd hero, Orr had “suddenly opened up the choice of withdrawal as a possibility for survival in a world where survival no longer seems possible,” (Waldmeir 68). Orr’s survival turns the key and lights the ignition for Yossarian, he knows what he wants to do and he knows that it’s possible.
The audience will never know how Yossarian’s final decision works out for him, but that is not important. His heroism is in his ability to escape the absurdity and choose an option that lets him control how he dies. Deserting is also certainly not the safest option either; in fact “in Heller’s intention, Yossarian is not copping out, is not taking the easy way, but rather ‘moved off dead center finally,’” (McDonald). The dead center that McDonald refers to is the military structure that Yossarian is finally able to get away from. Typical criticism of a deserter probably includes the phrase “running away from their responsibilities,” but Yossarian responds by saying “I’m not running away from my responsibilities. I’m running to them. There’s nothing negative about running away to save my life,” (Heller 451). His ultimate responsibility is to his own life, and by attempting to leave he is satisfying that requirement. He is opening up his world to more of the good possibilities present in the free world, and dropping the limited and hopeless alternatives, essentially “he will scrape away all of those restrictions, prejudices, and preconceptions that confine him in a shell of reduced possibilities,” (Bryant 229). These reduced possibilities are again the different people he meets along the way: Milo who is caught in a convoluted web of economic connections, the bandaged void, or even Doc Daneeka, who dies a bureaucratic death that causes his wife to leave him forever while collecting his life insurance. These instances are merely side notes to the main story of Yossarian, and in all of these happenings is Yossarian. This emphasis creates a system in which everything is Yossarian’s fault, and Heller uses this to say, “the individual, not bureaucracy or establishment, still holds the final trump,” (Sniderman 231). Yossarian’s deserting and central focus establish him as the one person in the novel who is sane, even though it doesn’t matter in a place that follows Catch-22. His sanity raises him above the ludicrousness of the system and he can truly be considered an absurd hero.
Yossarian in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 is an absurd hero because of his actions and his final decision on the illogical island of Pianosa. By first creating small disruptions, then refusing to fly, then ultimately fleeing, Yossarian is clearly a man who puts his life above all else, and is able to realize the absurdness of his situation. This puts him at an advantage, as he is able to exploit situations that he knows are absurd. By being just subversive enough to be a nuisance, but not enough to be treasonous, Yossarian is able to get under Cathcart’s skin and present a problem that the leadership did not anticipate. Their scrambling to contain him results in a biased and absurd deal which springboards Yossarian into deciding to desert. He is hailed as an American literary hero, because he protests the ridiculous military structure that is designed to place less importance on the actual lives of soldiers. By deserting he proves he is sane enough to not fly missions and insane enough to try something that has only been successful once before, thus beating Catch-22. After all, we all know that with every perfect catch, there is a catch.