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Catch 22 Satire

1633 Words7 Pages

War’s effect of wiping away the personal characteristics of the soldiers and amalgamating their identity demonstrates its destructive nature. In “An Overview of Catch-22,” Darren Felty’s critical essay, the author emphasizes Heller’s satire of the systematic devaluation of human life through war. Felty explains this scorn through the revelations of the character Yossarian, elaborating on how Heller uses Yossarian to denounce war’s dehumanization by asserting, His satire targets not just the military but all regimental institutions that treat individuals as cogs in a machine. His central character, Yossarian, recognizes the insanity of social institutions that devalue human life and tries to rebel against them, first in minor ways and finally through outright rejection of them (Felty). Through Yossarian, Heller satirizes systems that dehumanize …show more content…

These ideas simply do not exist, and any man is replaceable, even in intimate issues. The doctor uses Yossarian to replace a dead soldier for that soldier’s family, as if all the dead soldier’s personal connections meant nothing. To the system, individualism has no value, the soldiers are just replaceable matter. As both Heller and Felty prove, the systems of war treat all humans like matter. They devalue the soldiers to the point of ambiguity in which the individual is gone, replaceable with anyone. As the war tries to fuse Yossarian and his fellow soldiers into one massive identity, Yossarian fights back, combatting the forces that seek to raze his personal character. Yossarian is not just a simple, mass-produced part of a machine, but a unique being with his own world of thoughts, resisting the system to preserve this idea. War’s destructive nature wipes away all personal characteristics of the soldiers, coercing them into one entity and destroying the fundamental American ideal of

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