THEMES

THE ABSOLUTE POWER OF BUREAUCRACY - One of the most terrifying aspects of Catch-22 is the fact

that the lives and deaths of the men in Yossarian’s squadron are governed not by their own decisions

concerning dangerous risks but by the decisions of an impersonal, frightening bureaucracy. The men must risk

their lives even when they know that their missions are useless, as when they are forced to keep flying combat

missions late in the novel even after they learn that the Allies have essentially won the war. The bureaucrats

are absolutely deaf to any attempts that the men make to reason with them logically; they constantly defy logic.

Major Major, for example, will see people in his office only when he is not there, and Doc Daneeka won’t

ground Yossarian for insanity because Yossarian’s desire to be grounded reveals that he must be sane. So he

and his companions learn that what they do and say has very little effect on what happens to them. All they

can do is learn to navigate their way through the bureaucracy, using its illogical rules to their own advantage

whenever possible.

LOSS OF RELIGIOUS FAITH - Yossarian points out that no truly good, omniscient God would have created

human suffering. Yossarian has experienced so many terrible things that he cannot believe in a God who

would create such a wide variety of options when it comes to pain and death. But the loss of faith in God does

not mean a world without morals for the characters. Instead, it means a world in which each man must make

his own morals—as Yossarian does when he chooses to desert the army rather than betray his squadron.

THE IMPOTENCE OF LANGUAGE - In the first chapter of Catch-22, we see Yossarian randomly deleting

words from the letters that he is required to censor while he is in the hospital. At first, this act seems terrible:

the letters are the men’s only way of communicating with loved ones at home, and Yossarian is destroying that

line of communication. As we learn more about Yossarian’s world, however, we see that the military

bureaucracy has taken the communicative power out of language. Faced with the realities of death and the

absurdity of its circumstances, language seems unable to communicate any sort of reassurance.

While language has no power to comfort in the novel, it does have the power to circumvent logic and trap the

squadron in an inescapable prison of bureaucracy. Catch-22 itself is nothing but a bunch of words strung

together to circumvent logic and keep Yossarian flying missions.