Catch 22 # Heller flew 60 bombing missions between May and October 1944, a feat that should have killed him three times over, statistically speaking, since the average personnel loss was 5 percent per mission. Instead, the experience turned him into a fiction writer and a tortured, funny, deeply peculiar human being. Tracy Daugherty It’s the closing months of World War II and Yossarian has never been closer to death.

Themes - Catch-22 # Bureaucratic organisations and institutions # Institutional rot begins with a rift between managers and workers. Australian University Professors described their universities as being exploitative, oppressive, toxic and fiscally driven. They felt themselves being dehumanised and demoralised by management. Most reported experiencing feelings associated with burnout, including anxiety, cynicism, depression and exhaustion. The “craziness of university decisions and processes”, “the absurdity”, the conflicting demands and constant institutional change have led to them losing interest, spirit and hope.

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.

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.