Truthful satire. Convoluted plots. Self-centered soldiers. Not one author has integrated and intertwined these attributes in a historical fiction novel, Catch-22, better than Joseph Heller. Heller uses his own experience from the war to create intriguingly weird characters in an unorthodox manner that sheds light on the madness of war. On May 1, 1923, Joseph Heller was born on Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York. He quite enjoyed writing as a kid and even sent in a story that he had written to the New York Daily News, but it was rejected. When Heller became 19, he joined the U.S. Army Air Corps. Within a few years, he flew on sixty combat missions in Italy as a B-25 bombardier in World War II. Joseph recalled the war as being fun at the start, …show more content…
His main purpose for writing this book was most likely his involvement in WWII as B-25 bombardier. He needed to explain the insanity of countries that start wars and the even more insane soldiers who fight them. Heller focuses mostly on the bombardiers as that was what he was himself. These plane-flying and bomb-dropping characters don’t change much throughout the book, only more is revealed about how absolutely mental all of them are. Some of this insanity includes a guy who buys eggs for seven cents, sells them for 5 cents, and makes a profit or a guy who is prosecuted for stealing a tomato by the guy that gave him the tomato. The historical as well as social contexts of Catch-22 are very important to consider when reading it. The book was about WWII and published during the Vietnam War, so this literary work is very intertwined with war. The characters are also quite representative of how the american people felt about war at that time. In the book, the soldiers just want to go home but they’re not allowed because of a indisputable rule made up by the higher officials. This resonated very well with people impacted by the Vietnam War, causing the book to sell like