Catch 22 # Catch-22 can mean a situation in which your actions invite problems, not solutions, and you let that state continue at the cost of blurring any future solutions to the issues in different areas of action. In Joseph Heller’s anti-war classic Catch-22, the pilots joke while one by one they get shot down. The combination of bleak humour with a serious message played out numerous times throughout the 20th century.

Themes - Catch-22 # Bureaucratic organisations and institutions # Institutions become corrupted incipiently, incestuously and insidiously when a group of self-serving members attracts others interested in forming a cabal within the organization dedicated to assuming control. All institutions gravitate to dystrophy leading to morbundity unless held to founding values by strong upright leadership. Corrupt conduct encompasses far more than the common understanding of what makes for a dodgy public servant.

Catch-22 characters # The Vietnam war created a market for a story that depicted US army commanders as quixotic, paranoid brutes. Most of the characters have become insane or are living in a world of illusions created by the system to rationalise imminent death and to survive. They are full of contradictions, paradoxes or outright absurdities. Nothing makes sense. Officers # General P. P. Peckem # The U.S.O. troupes were sent by General P.

catch-22 technique # Literature of the Absurd # Society is usually controlled and manipulated by the powerful over the weak. Perhaps the first absurdist writer was Aesop: “We hang petty thieves, the great ones are appointed to high office.” Horace and Juvenal used their wit to send up the pompous leaders of their times. European Carnivals of Medieval and the Renaissance “were a subversive force, turning power and authority on its head and inverting the priorities of power.