Catch-22 at 50, and my own reading at 10

As my 10-year High School reunion passes unattended and unobserved, I cringe at quite a few late-adolescent moments; but one I still stand by is the day I ran into the backyard and threw my copy of Catch-22 into the air, in joy and exultation. I have just finished the novel for a third time (the 50th anniversary edition seemed as good an excuse as any to buy my own copy), and I was gratified to read that in the back appendix, that Christopher Hitchens, a writer with whom I often sharply disagree but greatly respect, likewise sent his own copy "hurtling skywards with a yell of triumph." I still feel the same way over a decade later.

I bring this up because the novel's ending is often cited as "weak;" Norman Mailer called it "Hollywood." This, for me, is like the critique that the book's characters are "flat," or "just a collection of tics." Of course they're flat and empty--the whole point of the book is that these characters are relentlessly dehumanized, and that often quite literally! It's a book not just about the insanity inherent in war, but also in the very civilizations that allow war to exist, nay thrive. These characters are often dead long before they're blown out of the sky.

It is the same with the ending; critiquing it's sudden optimistic turn misses the whole point, for the novel could not have ended any other way. To bleakly kill him off would have been but a predictable cheat.

For Yossarian has to escape, Yossarian must stay alive--and what's more, must stay free--because more even than the Prince Hamlet of Act III, who clings desperately to life merely because he fears death "the undiscovered country" even more, Yossarian fears death because he sees the intrinsic value of life.

By contrast, the insane system that entraps him sees life only in how it can be traded for profit and advancement; but Yossarian, the last sane man alive, wishes life for its own sake--life is its own reason for being, and it is beautiful and grand and wonderful enough in and of itself.

Yossarian requires no other justification for staying alive than the fact that it is glorious to be alive! Simply living is a subversive act; just staying alive is an act of rebellion.

As such, Yossarian must affirm that his logic is greater, is better, than the fiends who surround him. His enemy is anyone trying to kill him--whether they be complete strangers blowing flak at him just because he's dropping bombs on him, or his own commanders who would gladly trade his life for a promotion. For all of the novel's relentless horror and black-as-coffee comedy, a jubilant joie de vivre permeates through the character of Yossarian, and thus the novel can only end with him escaping the catch-22 at last.

Yossarian's joyous desertion, then, is ironically a call to action. Killing off Yossarian at the end would have been the real cop-out, lazy ending--it took courage for Heller to set him free, just as it takes courage to set ourselves free. As Yossarian himself says at his final escape, "I'm not running away from my responsibilities, I'm running to them." Living is its own responsibility, its own raison d'etre; war is waged to protect life, so thus without a healthy respect for and love of life, war loses all meaning. War and honor and sacrifice do not give meaning to life--quite the inverse, in fact.

Yossarian escapes not because he's special, or some Nietzschean superman, (on the contrary, when asked "What if everyone acted the way you did," Yossarian responds with the humble, egalitarian, "Well then, I'd be a damn fool to think otherwise, wouldn't I!"), but simply because he's alive, and that's reason enough. We, too, are also alive, and that is reason enough to treasure life as well.