Joseph Heller's Novel Circulates

In a manner of speaking, the novel circulates around a kind of rebel-victim antihero whose sole purpose in life is to save his skin/neck in various successive attempts to evade the brutal atrocities and idiocies of a self-centered regime whose military commanders are in a constant pursuance to enslave him and victimize his fellow mates in the squadron for their own ego-centric aspirations.

A closer look into this novel makes clear that Heller does justice to his literary gifts through his use of the absurd, fantastic and realistic to advocate the value of the American individual and portray the human predicament in the second half of the twentieth century via the medium of a rebellious antihero to bring into sharper focus some of the mutinous

First,I hope in the following paragraphs to harp on the extent to which Heller's novel comes as an unimpeachable first-hand testimony and an authentic reproduction. Second, a proper part of my concern here in this study is devoted to scrutinize the narrative strategies in Heller's novel to lay bare his virtuosity and dexterity in deploying the picaresque mode as the most appropriate generic form and a dequate literary aesthetics for handling such satirical

He highly appreciates Heller's dexterity and highlights his technical analogies with the Marx Brothers, Max Schulman, and S.J. Perelman, whilst comparing his "mordant intelligence" to Nathanael West. He further underscores Heller's virtuosity to "penetrate the surface of the merely funny to expose a world of ruthless self-advancement, gruesome cruelty, and flagrant disregard for human life-a world, in short, very much like our own as seen through a magnifying glass, distorted for more perfect accuracy."(6) Brian Way in his innovative essay "Formal Experiment and Social Discontent: Joseph Heller's Catch-22" celebrates the book as "One of the most important strands in the American novel since 1900 and in the culture generally-has been the varied and forceful expression of protest, social discontent, and radical attitudes."(253) Fredrick R. Karl, in his ground-breaking article "Only Fools Walk in Darkness" , touches upon one of the most crucial reasons behind the novel's success when he maintains:

Catch-22 obviously appeals to the student, who beneath his complacency and hipster frigidity is very confused and afraid. It appeals to the sophisticated professional- the educator, lawyer, professor-who must work at something he cannot fully trust. It appeals to the business man, who does not really believe that his empire primarily serves