1. The Alcoholic Empire
Catch-22 has much passion, comic and fervent, but it gasps for want of craft and sensibility. A portrait gallery, a collection of anecdote, some of them wonderful, a parade of scenes, some of them finely assembled, a series of descriptions, yes, but the book is no novel. It, is like a brilliant painter who decides to throw all the ideas in his sketch books onto one canvas, relying on their charm and shock to compensate for the lack of design (Stern 50). .
The plot of this story is based around the title, Catch-22. This book is unusual in that the main theme of the book revolves around the title. Joseph Heller, through his extensive research concerning WWII, manages to express one of the ironies involved in serving as a pilot in this war. This irony is perpetuated throughout this novel, and it negates the need for order or chronology in the plot. .
When Yossarian, the main character, tries to escape the army, he realizes that the only way possible to get out of the army is to declare insanity, but to declare insanity must indicate sanity. In effect, there is no way to escape the war. Yossarian tries many times to escape, but as far as he gets is in the hospital and always eventually gets sent back to the army. This is an example of how Joseph Heller neglects chronology in order to express the main theme of his novel. What Heller does is he breaks up the logical and chronological development of the narrative elements by taking bits and pieces of all three and mixing them together with dashes of expository and rhetorical comment without regard to logical or temporal or spatial connection (Burhans .
The apartment where the whores lived is deserted and the girls have been put out on the streets. Yossarian finds the old woman who lived in the complex sobbing. She tells Yossarian that the only right the soldiers had to chase the girls away was the right of Catch-22, which says "they have a right to do anything we can't stop them from doing.
William Blake was born on November 28th, 1757 as the third of five children to a London hosier. Because of the relatively lower middle class status of his father's profession, Blake was raised in the same state of poverty that he would experience throughout his entire life. As a child, he was alread...