Great pieces of literature are influenced by their author's life and the times in which they were written. These two factors combine to make literature that is both entertaining and meaningful to readers. Joseph Heller's outrageously funny and very affecting novel Catch-22 is a perfect example. Heller draws on his past and alludes to events happening during the time in which he wrote to create what the Chicago Sun-Times called "an apocalyptic masterpiece.".
Heller's past is very evident throughout Catch-22. Joseph Heller grew up in Coney Island, New York, a town famous for its carnival atmosphere and attractions (Biography 1). This environment led to Heller's satirical and darkly humorous attitude evident in his own life and especially in his writing. Catch-22 is a social satire that utilizes dark humor. In one instance Heller makes a point by joking about death. In his novel he makes the army unable to recognize that Mudd is dead and Doc is alive because they have more faith in the military's records than the reality of one live body and one dead body (Miller 43). Furthermore, the main character in Catch-22, Yossarian, is essentially based on Heller himself. Heller flew as a bombardier on some sixty combat missions for the U.S. Army Air Force during World War II. He was stationed on the island of Corsica in the Mediterranean Sea (Moss 66). Similarly, Yossarian is a bombardier during WWII who also is stationed on an island in the Mediterranean Sea (Miller 5). It is through Yossarian that Heller conveys a sense of his own experience in war and his own fear of dying in combat.
The realism and entertaining effect brought by Heller's use of his own experiences attracted an unlikely audience to his anti-war novel, WWII veterans. Critics said of this, "To veterans of World War II, it was a hilarious reminder of the chaos and disorder that seemed always to hover just beneath the structured surface of military life.
Catch-22 Outline I. Introduction A. Features black humor, an unusual narrative structure, surrealism B. Yossarian is a not-so-heroic protagonist who struggles to deal with the insanity of war and concludes that the only sane response to it is not to participate in it II. Author Infor...
Globalisation must not be seen as a homogeneous or totalising process but one in which economic, socio-political and cultural dynamics (both historical and immediate) and sub national, national, international and super-regional processes are all at work. ... In such a context part of the problem with understanding globalisation is the nature of the populist, sometime hysterical, discourse on the subject to be found not only in the media but also in a range of so-called scholarly texts that reduce 'globalisation' to a set of slogans to be either exhorted or demonised.1 Throughout ...
Shelley's "Ode To the West Wind": Analysis In "Ode to the West Wind," Percy Bysshe Shelley tries to gain transcendence, for he shows that his thoughts, like the "winged seeds" (7) are trapped. The West Wind acts as a driving force for change and rejuvenation in the human and natural world. Shelley v...
Many see it as a primarily economic phenomenon, involving the increasing interaction, or integration, of national economic systems through the growth in international trade, investment and capital flows. However, one can also point to a rapid increase in cross-border social, cultural and technological exchange as part of the phenomenon of globalisation. The sociologist, Anthony Giddens, defines globalisation as a decoupling of space and time, emphasising that with instantaneous communications, knowledge and culture can be shared around the world simultaneously. A Dutch academic who maint...
It is technically less interesting than its previous ones because it is b ed on a historical event which is explicit enough to solve, the difficult dramatic problems which Miller had originally set himself. ... Cushing Scott states that, Miller has argued for (the) historical truth (of the play), pointed to its contemporary parallels, and defined its transhistorical subject as a social process that includes, but also transcends, the Salem witchcraft trials a the anticommunist investigations of the 1950's (128). ...
