Similarly, the effect the horrors of combat have on certain characters in Catch-22 is demonstrated through their desperate efforts to escape. Yossarian frequently flees to the hospital because “they couldn’t dominate Death inside the hospital, but they certainly made her behave.” (165). Men in the hospital “didn’t explode into blood and clotted matter. They didn’t drown or get struck by lightning, mangled by machinery or crushed in landslides. They didn’t get shot to death” but instead “bled to death like gentlemen in an operating room” (166). Yossarian goes into the hospital as a means of escape, and despite being surrounded by death when in combat as well as in the hospital, he prefers the hospital because the death is less of a surprise …show more content…
Heller introduces Yossarian’s roommate Orr as a skilled mechanic, tailoring their tent to reach the utmost level of comfort. As the story progresses, Orr crash lands in the water multiple times on almost every mission he flies, however the reader eventually learns that these landings were for a purpose, as Orr found a way to paddle to Sweden and escape the war after a crash landing. Orr knew “what he was doing every step of the way”, risking his life in multiple “accidental” crashes in order to time his escape from the war and seek refuge in Sweden (449). The horrors of battle led Orr to risk his life multiple times to practice crash landing so that he would have a slim hope of escaping. By comparing the horrors of war with the hopeful and surprising scene of Orr’s escape, the author is able to truly present a unique and thought provoking perspective on the nature of war. Orr’s desire to evade the injustice of the military institution required him to outthink his commanding officers and risk his own life. Due to the severity of the war, Orr was willing to risk his own life in order to get a chance to avoid combat, this demonstrates how far a person would be willing to go in order to escape a situation they cannot bear to deal with