Catch 22 Theme Of Death Essay

This quote is the narrator speaking about Yossarian right after he had just abandoned a mission Bologna in chapter fourteen. The setting is in a forest near a beach on Pianosa. With death being a key theme in Catch-22, the whole entire scene is described as a graveyard as to emphasize this theme. The mushroom are portrayed as “fingers” and “lifeless stalks of flesh” thus both being human and dead. Scenes, such as this one, conveys the feeling of despair that comes along with death because of the use of words like, “necrotic” which are decaying body cells that are painful. The separate ground settings have contrasting qualities. The ground of the mushrooms is “clammy” soil, while the land Yossarian goes to escape the mushrooms is dry sand. The soil signifies the war, and the sand signifies life outside the war. The discomfort of the war is shown with words like, “clammy” and “swarming”, and the way Yossarian quickly rushes to the dry sand in order to escape shows the life outside of war. This quote also exemplifies how Yossarian views death. Once Yossarian sees the mushrooms, they

When Yossarian reaches the sand, he feels as if the mushrooms were going to come after him. This could both signify how Yossarian fears death in general because he believes that everyone and everything is out to get him, or it could signify the people that he left for dead coming back to get him. With the mushrooms showing that he’s afraid of death portion, it can be explained with him feeling “eerie” and not slowing down until he reached sand, because he tells his squadron peers that people are trying to kill him in a superstitious way, and consistently tries to get out of doing missions. However, Yossarian was expecting them to crawl after him to catch him after he was left behind, so this shows that he felt guilty because it was as if they were trying to take him back to