Morality In Joseph Heller's Catch 22

In the thrilling World War II novel, Catch 22, Joseph Heller manages to completely capture the confusing lives of soldiers fighting to stay alive. The novel mostly follows one soldier named Yossarian, a bombardier who tries to feign sickness to get out of fighting in the war, not able to reach the number of required missions to go home. Throughout the novel, Yossarian experiences many things which turns him into the righteous person the reader sees him as at the end of the novel. His morals are confusing, what he thinks is right is not actually right, but throughout the book he slowly realizes there are some things that you should do, and others that you should not. These lessons make him into a better person who chooses the right path and

This death effects Yossarian heavily because, throughout the book, he has flashbacks to when he died, and it helps him develop a new moral compass which ultimately leads him closer to the righteous life he wants to live. One of the first flashbacks to the death that Yossarian has is when he is in the hospital with some other soldiers, contemplating why death impacts so many people. He realizes then and there that, for no apparent reason, and in no specific order, people are killed during war. He is too focused on trying not to die then to listen, but that helps him to realize the injustice in the death of these random soldiers. Snowden also helps him later in this war to realize that he values other people more than he thinks he does. Yossarian is so concerned for his friends flying flight missions with him because of how heavily he was traumatized by the death of Snowden. This death made him more caring, and when a fellow pilot was flying too close to the water as a joke, a spooked Yossarian shouted at him to “go up, go up, go up!” (332). He did not want McWatt, or him, to share the same fate as Snowden, dying cold in the back of a plane - a sad death. Yossarian chooses to threaten McWatt and make him go up because he is afraid and panicked, and he did not want to die alongside McWatt since he was afraid; seeing Snowden die beside him made Yossarian afraid and lose any

At first, he is so desperate to be grounded that he agrees to this deal, even though it is betraying the men in his squadron who unfairly have to fly more missions, and is filled with joy at the mere thought of going home. However, his mind is changed when he has another flashback of Snowden, and he tells Danby that he cannot accept the deal made by Cathcart and Korn because “[i]t’s an odious deal” and he does not want to betray his friends, saying that if he gets sent home for anything he wants it to be for flying 50 missions and not for getting “stabbed by that girl, or because [he’s] turned into such a stubborn [man]” (441-442). He refuses to fly anymore missions for the sake of his safety, but refuses to go home in an unfair manner as he feels it would upset the rest of his squadron. This makes his moral compass golden. Throughout the novel, he sees and understands how people act during war, but he questions it and reacts “ the way he does because he sees that the aims have been perverted. The men no longer serve a cause; they serve the insane whims of their superiors” (Felty). He no longer wants to be a prisoner of war, and he knows that he should go home, but he also knows that it would be serving his superiors the way they want if