American Literature books summary

off Marvin Frey. Jack goes to the Governor's Mansion the night the deal is

made, and finds Willie a drunken wreck; Willie insults and threatens Gummy

Larson, and throws a drink in Tiny Dufiy's face. Tom continues to spiral

out of control. He gets in a fight with some yokels at a bar, and is

suspended for the game against Georgia, which the team loses. Two games

later, Tom is injured in the game against Tech, and is carried off the

field unconscious. Willie watches the rest of the game, which State wins

easily, then goes to the hospital to check on Tom. Jack goes back to the

offce, where he finds Sadie Burke sitting alone in the dark, apparently

very upset. Sadie leaves when Jack tells her about Tom's injury, then calls

from the hospital to tell Jack to come over right away.

Jack goes to the hospital, where the Boss sends him to pick up Lucy. Jack

does so, and upon their arrival they learn that the specialist Adam Stanton

called in to look at Tom has been held up by fog in Baltimore. Willie is

frantic, but eventually the specialist arrives. His diagnosis matches

Adam's: Tom has fractured two vertebrae, and the two doctors recommend a

risky surgery to see if the damage can be repaired. They undertake the

surgery, and Willie, Jack, and Lucy wait. Willie tells Lucy that he plans

to name the hospital after Tom, but Lucy says that things like that don't

matter. At six o'clock in the morning, Adam returns, and tells the group

that Tom will live, but that his spinal cord is crushed, and he will be

paralyzed for the rest of his life. Lucy takes Willie home, and Jack calls

Anne with the news. The operation was accomplished just before dawn on

Sunday. On Monday, Jack sees the piles of telegrams that have come into the

offce from political allies and well-wishers, and talks to the obsequious

Tiny. When Willie comes in, he declares to Tiny that he is canceling Gummy

Larson's contract. He implies that he plans to change the way things are

done at the capital. Jack is taking some tax-bill figures to the Senate

when he learns that Sadie has just stormed out of the offce, and receives

word that Anne has just called with an urgent message.

Jack goes to see Anne, who says that Adam has learned about her

relationship with Willie, and believes the afiair to be the reason he was

given the directorship of the hospital. She tells Jack that Willie has

broken off the afiair because he plans to go back to his wife. She asks

Jack to find Adam and tell him that that isn't the way things happened.

Jack spends the day trying to track down Adam, but he fails to find him.

That night, Jack is paged to go to the Capitol, where the vote on the tax

bill is taking place. Here, Jack greets Sugar-Boy and watches the Boss talk

to his political hangers-on. The Boss tells Jack that he wants to tell him

something. As they walk across the lobby, they see a rain-and-mud-soaked

Adam Stanton leaning against the pedestal of a statue. Willie reaches out

his hand to shake Adam's; in a blur, Adam draws a gun and shoots Willie,

then is shot himself by Sugar-Boy and a highway patrolman. Jack runs to

Adam, who is already dead.

Willie survives for a few days, and at first the prognosis from the

hospital is that he will recover. But then he catches an infection, and

Jack realizes that he is going to die. Just before the end, he summons Jack

to his hospital bed, where he says over and over again that everything

could have been difierent.

After he dies, he is given a massive funeral. Jack says that the other

funeral he went to that week was quite difierent: it was Adam Stanton's

funeral at Burden's Landing.

Chapter 10 Summary

After Adam's funeral and Willie's funeral, Jack spends some time in

Burden's Landing, spending his days quietly with Anne. They never discuss

Willie's death or Adam's death; instead they sit wordlessly together, or

Jack reads aloud from a book. Then one day Jack begins to wonder how Adam

learned about Anne and Willie's afiair. He asks her, but she says she does

not know-- a man called and told him, but she does not know who it was.

Jack goes to visit Sadie Burke in the sanitarium where she has gone to

recover her nerves. She tells Jack that Tiny Dufiy (now the governor of the

state) was the man who called Adam; and she confesses that Tiny learned

about the afiair from her. She was so angry about Willie leaving her to go

back to Lucy that she told Tiny out of revenge, knowing that, by doing so,

she was all but guaranteeing Willie's death. Jack blames Tiny rather than

Sadie, and Sadie agrees to make a statement which Jack can use to bring

about Tiny's downfall.

A week later, Dufiy summons Jack to see him. He offers Jack his job back,

with a substantial raise over Jack's already substantial income. Jack

refuses, and tells Tiny he knows about his role in Willie's death. Tiny is

stunned, and frightened, and when Jack leaves he feels heroic. But his

feeling of moral heroism quickly dissolves into an acidic bitterness,

because he realizes he is trying to make Tiny the sole villain as a way of

denying his own share of responsibility. Jack withdraws into numbness, not

even opening a letter from Anne when he receives it. He receives a letter

from Sadie with her statement, saying that she is moving away and that she

hopes Jack will let matters drop--Tiny has no chance to win the next

gubernatorial election anyway, and if Jack pursues the matter Anne's name

will be dragged through the mud. But Jack had already decided not to pursue

it.

At the library Jack sees Sugar-Boy, and asks him what he would do if he

learned that there was a man besides Adam who was responsible for Willie's

death. Sugar-Boy says he would kill him, and Jack nearly tells him about

Tiny's role. But he decides not to at the last second, and instead tells

Sugar-Boy that it was a joke. Jack also goes to see Lucy, who has adopted

Sibyl Frey's child, which she believes is Tom's. She tells Jack that Tom

died of pneumonia shortly after the accident, and that the baby is the only

thing that enabled her to live. She also tells him that she believes--and

has to believe--that Willie was a great man. Jack says that he also

believes it.

Jack goes to visit his mother at Burden's Landing, where he learns that she

is leaving Theodore Murrell, the Young Executive. He is surprised to learn

that she is doing so because she loved Judge Irwin all along. This

knowledge changes Jack's long-held impression of his mother as a woman

without a heart, and helps to shatter his belief in the Great Twitch. At

the train station, he lies to his mother, and tells her that Judge Irwin

killed himself not because of anything that Jack did, but because of his

failing health. He thinks of this lie as his last gift to her.

After his mother leaves, he goes to visit Anne, and tells her the truth

about his parentage. Eventually, he and Anne are married, and in the early

part of 1939, when Jack is writing his story, they are living in Judge

Irwin's house in Burden's Landing. The Scholarly Attorney, now frail and

dying, lives with them. Jack is working on a book about Cass Mastern, whom

he believes he can finally understand. After the old man dies and the book

is finished, Jack says, he and Anne will leave Burden's Landing--stepping

"out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time."

CATCH-22

(Joseph Heller)

SOME INFO ON JOSEPH HELLER

b. May 1, 1923, Brooklyn, N.Y., U.S.

American writer whose novel Catch-22 (1961) was one of the most

significant works of protest literature to appear after World War II. The

satirical novel was both a critical and a popular success, and a film

version appeared in 1970.Heller flew 60 combat missions as a bombardier

with the U.S. Air Force in Europe. He received an M.A. at Columbia

University in 1949 and was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Oxford

(1949-50). He taught English at Pennsylvania State University (1950-52) and

worked as an advertising copywriter for the magazines Time (1952-56) and

Look (1956-58) and as promotion manager for McCall's (1958-61), meanwhile

writing Catch-22 in his spare time. The plot of the novel centres on the

antihero Captain John Yossarian, stationed at an airstrip on a

Mediterranean island in World War II, and portrays his desperate attempts

to stay alive. The "catch" in Catch-22 involves a mysterious Air Force

regulation, which asserts that a man is considered insane if he willingly

continues to fly dangerous combat missions; but, if he makes the necessary

formal request to be relieved of such missions, the very act of making the

request proves that he is sane and therefore ineligible to be relieved. The

term Catch-22 thereafter entered the English language as a reference to a

proviso that trips one up no matter which way one turns.His later novels

including Something Happened (1974), an unrelievedly pessimistic novel,

Good as Gold (1979), a satire on life in Washington, D.C., and God Knows

(1984), a wry, contemporary-vernacular monologue in the voice of the

biblical King David, were less successful. Closing Time, a sequel to Catch-

22, appeared in 1994. Heller's dramatic work includes the play We Bombed in

New Haven (1968).

CONTEXT

Joseph Heller was born in Brooklyn in 1923. He served as an Air Force

bombardier in World War II, and has enjoyed a long career as a writer and a

teacher. His bestselling books include Something Happened, Good as Gold,

Picture This, God Knows, and Closing Time--but his first novel, Catch-22,

remains his most famous and acclaimed work.

Written while Heller worked producing ad copy for a New York City

marketing firm, Catch-22 draws heavily on Heller's Air Force experience,

and presents a war story that is at once hilarious, grotesque, bitterly

cynical, and utterly stirring. The novel generated a great deal of

controversy upon its publication; critics tended either to adore it or

despise it, and those who hated it did so for the same reason as the

critics who loved it. Over time, Catch-22 has become one of the defining

novels of the twentieth century. It presents an utterly unsentimental

vision of war, stripping all romantic pretense away from combat, replacing

visions of glory and honor with a kind of nightmarish comedy of violence,

bureaucracy, and paradoxical madness.

Unlike other anti-romantic war novels, such as Remarque's All Quiet on

the Western Front, Catch-22 relies heavily on humor to convey the insanity

of war, presenting the horrible meaninglessness of armed conflict through a

kind of desperate absurdity, rather than through graphic depictions of

suffering and violence. Catch-22 also distinguishes itself from other anti-

romantic war novels by its core values: Yossarian's story is ultimately not

one of despair, but one of hope; the positive urge to live and to be free

can redeem the individual from the dehumanizing machinery of war. The novel

is told as a disconnected series of loosely related, tangential stories in

no particular chronological order; the final narrative that emerges from

this structural tangle upholds the value of the individual in the face of

the impersonal, collective military mass; at every stage, it mocks

insincerity and hypocrisy even when they appear to be triumphant.

SUMMARY FOR "CATCH-22"

Chapters 1-5

Yossarian is in a military hospital in Italy with a liver condition

that isn't quite jaundice. He is not really even sick, but he prefers the

hospital to the war outside, so he pretends to have a pain in his liver.

The doctors are unable to prove him wrong, so they let him stay, perplexed

at his failure to develop jaundice. Yossarian shares the hospital ward with

his friend Dunbar; a bandaged, immobile man called the soldier in white;

and a pair of nurses Yossarian suspect hate him. One day an affable Texan

is brought into the ward, where he tries to convince the other patients

that "decent folk" should get extra votes. The Texan is so nice that

everyone hates him. A chaplain comes to see Yossarian, and although he

confuses the chaplain badly during their conversation, Yossarian is filled

with love for him. Less than ten days after the Texan is sent to the ward,

everyone but the soldier in white flees the ward, recovering from their

ailments and returning to active duty.

Outside the hospital there is a war going on, and millions of boys are

bombing each other to death. No one seems to have a problem with this

arrangement except Yossarian, who once argued with Clevinger, an officer in

his group, about the war. Yossarian claimed that everyone was trying to

kill him. Clevinger argued that no one was trying to kill Yossarian

personally, but Yossarian has no patience for Clevinger's talk of countries

and honor and insists that they are trying to kill him. After being

released from the hospital, Yossarian sees his roommate Orr and notices

that Clevinger is still missing. He remembers the last time he and

Clevinger called each other crazy, during a night at the officers' club

when Yossarian announced to everyone present that he was superhuman because

no one had managed to kill him yet. Yossarian is suspicious of everyone

when he gets out of the hospital; he has a meal in Milo's mess hall, then

talks to Doc Daneeka, who enrages Yossarian by telling him that Colonel

Cathcart has raised to fifty the number of missions required before a

soldier can be discharged. The previous number was forty-five. Yossarian

has flown forty missions.

Yossarian talks to Orr, who tells him an irritating story about how he

liked to keep crab apples in his cheeks when he was younger. Yossarian

briefly remembers the time a whore had beaten Orr over the head with her

shoe in Rome outside Nately's whore's kid sister's room. Yossarian notices

that Orr is even smaller than Huple, who lives near Hungry Joe's tent.

Hungry Joe has nightmares whenever he isn't scheduled to fly a mission the

next day; his screaming keeps the whole camp awake. Hungry Joe's tent is

near a road where the men sometimes pick up girls and take them out to the

the tall grass near the open-air movie theater that a U.S.O. troupe visited

that same afternoon. The troupe was sent by an ambitious general named P.P.

Peckem, who hopes to take over the command of Yossarian's wing from General

Dreedle. General Peckem's troubleshooter Colonel Cargill, who used to be a

spectacular failure as a marketing executive and who is now a spectacular

failure as a colonel. Yossarian feels sick, but Doc Daneeka still refuses

to ground him. Doc Daneeka advises Yossarian to be like Havermeyer and make

the best of it; Havermeyer is a fearless lead bombardier. Yossarian thinks

that he himself is a lead bombardier filled with a very healthy fear.

Havermeyer likes to shoot mice in the middle of the night; once, he woke

Hungry Joe and caused him to dive into one of the slit trenchs that have

appeared nightly beside every tent since Milo Minderbinder, the mess

officer, bombed the squadron.

Hungry Joe is crazy, and though Yossarian tries to help him, Hungry Joe

won't listen to his advice because he thinks Yossarian is crazy. Doc

Daneeka doesn't believe Hungry Joe has problems--he thinks only he has

problems, because his lucrative medical practice was ended by the war.

Yossarian remembers trying to disrupt the educational meeting in Captain

Black's intelligence tent by asking unanswerable questions, which caused

Group Headquarters to make a rule that the only people who could ask

questions were the ones who never did. This rule comes from Colonel

Cathcart and Lieutenant Colonel Korn, who also approved the skeet shooting

range where Yossarian can never hit anything. Dunbar loves shooting skeet

because he hates it and it makes the time go more slowly; his goal is to

live as long as possible by slowing down time, so he loves boredom and

discomfort, and he argues about this with Clevinger.

Doc Daneeka lives in a tent with an alcoholic Indian named Chief White

Halfoat, where he tells Yossarian about some sexually inept newlyweds he

had in his office once. Chief White Halfoat comes in and tells Yossarian

that Doc Daneeka is crazy and then relates the story of his own family:

everywhere they went, someone struck oil, and so oil companies sent agents

and equipment to follow them wherever they went. Doc Daneeka still refuses

to ground Yossarian, who asks if he would be grounded if he were crazy. Doc

Daneeka says yes, and Yossarian decides to go crazy. But that solution is

too easy: there is a catch. Doc Daneeka tells Yossarian about Catch-22,

which holds that, to be grounded for insanity, a pilot must ask to be

grounded, but that any pilot who asks to be grounded must be sane.

Impressed, Yossarian takes Doc Daneeka's word for it, just as he had taken

Orr's word about the flies in Appleby's eyes. Orr insists there are flies

in Appleby's eyes, and though Yossarian has no idea what Orr means, he

believes Orr because he has never lied to him before. They once told

Appleby about the flies, so that Appleby was worried on the way to a

briefing, after which they all took off in B-25s for a bombing run.

Yossarian shouted directions to the pilot, McWatt, to avoid antiaircraft

fire while Yossarian dropped the bombs. Another time while they were taking

evasive action Dobbs went crazy and started screaming "Help him," while the

plane spun out of control and Yossarian believed he was going to die. In

the back of the plane, Snowden was dying.

Chapters 6-10

Hungry Joe has his fifty missions, but the orders to send him home

never come, and he continues to scream all through every night. Doc Daneeka

persists in feeling sorry for himself while ignoring Hungry Joe's problems.

Hungry Joe is driven crazy by noises, and is mad with lust--he is desperate

to take pictures of naked women, but the pictures never come out. He

pretends to be an important Life magazine photographer, and the irony is

that he really was a photographer for Life before the war. Hungry Joe has

flown six tours of duty, but every time he finishes one Colonel Cathcart

raises the number of missions required before Hungry Joe is sent home. When

this happens, the nightmares stop until Hungry Joe finishes another tour.

Colonel Cathcart is very brave about sending his men into dangerous

situations--no situation is too dangerous, just as no ping-pong shot is too

hard for Appleby. One night Orr attacked Appleby in the middle of a game; a

fight broke out, and Chief White Halfoat busted Colonel Moodus, General

Dreedle's son-in-law, in the nose. General Dreedle enjoyed that so much he

kept calling Chief White Halfoat in to repeat the performance--but the

Indian remains a marginal figure in the camp, much like Major Major, who

was promoted to squadron commander while playing basketball and who has

been ostracized ever since. Also, Ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen explains to

Yossarian how Catch-22 requires him to fly the extra missions Colonel

Cathcart orders, even though Twenty-Seventh Air Force regulations only

demand forty missions.

Yossarian's pilot, McWatt, is possibly the craziest of all the men,

because he is perfectly sane but he does not mind the war. He is smiling

and polite and loves to whistle show tunes. He is impressed with Milo--but

not as impressed as Milo was with the letter Yossarian got from Doc Daneeka

about his liver, which ordered the mess hall to give Yossarian all the

fresh fruit he wanted, which, in turn, Yossarian refused to eat, because if

his liver improved he couldn't go to the hospital whenever he wanted. Milo

is involved in the black market, and he tries to convince Yossarian to go

in with him in selling the fruit, but Yossarian refuses. Milo is indignant

when he learns that a C.I.D. (Criminal Investigation Division) man is

searching for a criminal who has been forging Washington Irving's name in

censored letters--it is Yossarian who used to pass time in the hospital by

writing the letters. But Milo is convinced the C.I.D. man is trying to set

him up because of his black market activity. Milo wants to organize the men

into a syndicate, as he demonstrates by returning McWatt's stolen bedsheet

in pieces--half for McWatt, a quarter for Milo, and so on. Milo has a grasp

on some confusing economics: he manages to make a profit buying eggs in

Malta for seven cents apiece and selling them in Pianosa for five cents

apiece.

Not even Clevinger understands that, but though he is a dope, he

usually understands everything, except why Yossarian insists that so many

people are trying to kill him. Yossarian remembers training in America with

Clevinger under Lieutenant Scheisskopf, who was obsessed with parades, and

whose wife, along with her friend Dori Duz, used to sleep with all the men

under her husband's command. Lieutenant Scheisskopf hated Clevinger, and

finally got him sent to trial under a belligerant colonel. Clevinger is

stunned when he realizes that Lieutenant Scheisskopf and the colonel truly

hate him, in a way that no enemy soldier ever could.

Given a horrible name at birth because of his father's horrible sense

of humor, Major Major Major was chagrined when, the day he joined the army,

he was promoted to Major by an IBM machine with an equally horrible sense

of humor, making him Major Major Major Major. Major Major Major Major also

looks vaguely like Henry Fonda, and did so well in school that he was

suspected of being a Communist and monitored by the FBI. His sudden

promotion stunned his drill sergeant, who had to train a man who was

suddenly his superior officer. Luckily, Major Major applied for aviation

cadet training, and was sent to Lieutenant Scheisskopf. Not long after

arriving in Pianosa, he was made squadron commander by an irate Colonel

Cathcart, after which he lost all his new friends. Major Major has always

been a drab, mediocre sort of person, and had never had friends before; he

lapses into an awkward depression and refuses to be seen in his office

except when he isn't there. To make himself feel better, Major Major forges

Washington Irving's name to official documents. He is confused about

everything, including his official relationship to Major ----- de Coverley,

his executive officer: He doesn't know whether he is Major ----- de

Coverlay's subordinate, or vice versa. A C.I.D. man comes to investigate

the Washington Irving scandal, but Major Major denies knowledge, and the

incompetent C.I.D. man believes him--as does another C.I.D. man who arrives

shortly thereafter, then leaves to investigate the first C.I.D. man. Major

Major takes to wearing dark glasses and a false mustache when forging

Washington Irving's name. One day Major Major is tackled by Yossarian, who

demands to be grounded. Sadly, Major Major tells Yossarian that there is

nothing he can do.

Clevinger's plane disappeared in a cloud off the coast of Elba, and he

is presumed dead. Yossarian finds the disappearance as stunning as that of

a whole squadron of sixty-four men who all deserted in one day. Then he

tells ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen the news, but ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen isn't

impressed with the disappearance. Ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen continually goes

AWOL, then is required to dig holes and fill them up again--work he seems

to enjoy. One day ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen nicked a water pipe, and water

sprayed everywhere, leading to mass confusion much like that of the night

seven months later when Milo bombed the camp. Word spread that the water

was oil, and Chief White Halfoat was kicked off the base. Around this time,

Appleby tried to turn Yossarian in for not taking his Atabrine tablets, but

the only time he was allowed to go into Major Major's office was when Major

Major wasn't there. Yossarian remembers Mudd, a soldier who died

immediately after arriving at the camp, and whose belongings are still in

Yossarian's tent. The belongings are contaminated with death in the same

way that the whole camp was contaminated before the deadly mission of the

Great Big Siege of Bologna, for which Colonel Cathcart bravely volunteered

his men. During this time even sick men were not allowed to be grounded by

doctors. Dr. Stubbs is overwhelmed with cynicism, and asks what the point

is of saving lives when everyone dies anyway. Dunbar says that the point is

to live as long as you can and forget about the fact that you will

eventually die.

Chapters 11-16

Captain Black is pleased to hear the news that Colonel Cathcart has

volunteered the men for the lethally dangerous mission of bombing Bologna.

Captain Black thinks the men are bastards, and gloats about their

terrifying, violent task. Captain Black is extremely ambitious, and hoped

to be promoted to squadron commander; when Major Major was picked over him,

he lapsed into a deep depression, which the Bologna mission lifts him out

of. Captain Black first tried to get revenge on Major Major by initiating

the Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade, when he forced all the men to swear

elaborate oaths of loyalty before doing basic things like eating meals. He

refused to let Major Major sign a loyalty oath, and hoped thereby to make

him appear disloyal. The Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade was a major event in

the camp, until the fearsome Major ----- de Coverley put a stop to it by

hollering "Give me eat!" in the mess hall without signing an oath.

It rains interminably before the Bologna mission, and the bombing run

is delayed by the rain. The men all hope it will never stop raining, and

when it does, Yossarian moves the bomb line on the map so that the

commanding officers will think Bologna has already been captured. Then the

rain starts again. In the meantime, Ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen tries to sell

Yossarian a cigarette lighter, thus going into competition with Milo as a

black market trader. He is aghast that Milo has cornered the entire world

market for Egyptian cotton but is unable to unload any of it. The men are

terrified and miserable over Bologna. Clevenger and Yossarian argue about

whether it is Yossarian's duty to bomb Bologna, and by the middle of the

second week of waiting, everyone in the squadron looks like Hungry Joe. One

night Yossarian, Nately, and Dunbar go for a drunken drive with Chief White

Halfoat; they crash the jeep, and realize it has stopped raining. Back in

the tents, Hungry Joe is trying to shoot Huple's cat, which has been giving

him nightmares, and the men force Hungry Joe to fight the cat fairly. The

cat runs away, and Hungry Joe is the self-satisfied winner; then he goes

back to sleep and has another nightmare about the cat.

Major ----- de Coverley is a daunting, majestic man with a lion's mane

of white hair, an eagle's gaze, and a transparent eyepatch. Everyone is

afraid of him, and no one will talk to him. His sole duties include

travelling to major cities captured by the Americans and renting rooms for

his men to take rest leaves in; he spends the rest of his time playing

horseshoes. He is so good at his room- renting duties that he always

manages to be photographed with the first wave of American troops moving

into a city, a fact which perplexes both the enemy and the American

commanders. Major ----- de Coverley is a force of nature, but when

Yossarian moved the bomb line, he was fooled and traveled to enemy-

controlled Bologna; he still has not returned. Once, Milo approached him on

the horseshoe range and convinced him to authorize Milo to import eggs with

Air Force planes. This elated the men, except for Colonel Cathcart, whose

spur-of-the-moment attempt to promote Major Major failed, unlike his

attempt to give Yossarian a medal some time earlier, which succeeded. Back

when Yossarian was brave, he circled over a target twice in order to hit

it; on the second overpass, Mudd was killed by shrapnel. The authorities

didn't know how to rebuke Yossarian for his foolhardiness, so they decided

to stave off criticism by giving him a medal.

The squadron finally receives the go-ahead to bomb Bologna, and by this

time Yossarian doesn't feel like going over the target even once. He

pretends that his plane's intercom system is broken and orders his men to

turn back. They land at the deserted airfield just before dawn, feeling

strangely morose; Yossarian takes a nap on the beach and wakes up when the

planes fly back. Not a single plane has been hit. Yossarian thinks that

there must have been too many clouds for the men to bomb the city, and that

they will have to make another attempt, but he is wrong. There was no

antiaircraft fire, and the city was bombed with no losses to the Americans.

Captain Pilchard and Captain Wren ineffectually reprimand Yossarian and

his crew for turning back, then inform the men that they will have to bomb

Bologna again, as they missed the ammunition dumps the first time.

Yossarian confidently flies in, assuming there will be no antiaircraft

fire, and is stunned when shrapnel begins firing up toward him through the

skies. He furiously directs McWatt through evasive maneuvers, and fights

with the strangely cheerful Aarfy until the bombs are dropped; Yossarian

doesn't die, and the plane lands safely. He heads immediately for emergency

rest leave in Rome, where he meets Luciana the same night.

Luciana is a beautiful Italian girl Yossarian meets at a bar in Rome.

After he buys her dinner and dances with her, she agrees to sleep with him,

but not right then--she will come to his room the next morning. She does,

then angrily refuses to sleep with Yossarian until she cleans his room--she

disgustedly calls him a pig. Finally, she lets him sleep with her.

Afterward, Yossarian falls in love with her and asks her to marry him; she

says she can't marry him because he's crazy, and he's crazy because he

wants to marry her, because no one in their right mind would marry a girl

who wasn't a virgin. She tells him about a scar she got when the Americans

bombed her town. Suddenly, Hungry Joe rushes in with his camera, and

Yossarian and Luciana have to get dressed. Laughing, they go outside, where

they part ways. Luciana gives Yossarian her number, telling him she expects

that he will tear it up as soon as she leaves, self-impressed that such a

pretty girl would sleep with him for free. He asks her why on Earth he

would do such a thing. As soon as she leaves, Yossarian, self-impressed

that such a pretty girl would sleep with him for free, tears up her number.

Almost immediately, he regrets it, and, after learning that Colonel

Cathcart has raised the number of missions to forty, he makes the anguished

decision to go straight to the hospital.

Chapters 17-21

Things are better at the hospital, Yossarian decides, than they are on

a bomb run with Snowden dying in the back whispering "I'm cold." At the

hospital, Death is orderly and polite, and there is no inexplicable

violence. Dunbar is in the hospital with Yossarian, and they are both

perplexed by the soldier in white, a man completely covered in plaster

bandages. The men in the hospital discuss the injustice of mortality--some

men are killed and some aren't, some men get sick and some don't, with no

reference to who deserves what. Some time earlier Clevinger saw justice in

it, but Yossarian was too busy keeping track of all the forces trying to

kill him to listen. Later, he and Hungry Joe collect lists of fatal

diseases with which they worry Doc Daneeka, who is the only person who can

ground Yossarian, according to Major Major. Doc Daneeka tells Yossarian to

fly his fifty-five missions, and he'll think about helping him.

The first time Yossarian ever goes to the hospital, he is still a

private. He feigns an abdominal pain, then mimics the mysterious ailment of

the soldier who saw everything twice. He spends Thanksgiving in the

hospital, and vows to spend all future Thanksgivings there; but he spends

the next Thanksgiving in bed with Lieutenant Scheisskopf's wife, arguing

about God. Once Yossarian is "cured" of seeing everything twice, he is

asked to pretend to be a dying soldier for a mother and father who have

traveled to see their son, who died that morning. Yossarian allows them to

bandage his face, and pretends to be the soldier.

The ambitious Colonel Cathcart browbeats the chaplain, demanding prayer

before each bombing run, then abandons the idea when he realizes that the

Saturday Evening Post, where he got the idea, probably wouldn't give him

any publicity for it. The chaplain timidly mentions that some of the men

have complained about Colonel Cathcart's habit of raising the number of

missions required every few weeks, but Colonel Cathcart ignores him. On his

way home, the chaplain meets Colonel Korn, Colonel Cathcart's wily, cynical

sidekick, who mocks Colonel Cathcart in front of the chaplain and is highly

suspicious of the plum tomato Colonel Cathcart gave the chaplain. At his

tent in the woods, the chaplain encounters the hostile Corporal Whitcomb,

his atheist assistant, who resents him deeply for holding back his career.

Corporal Whitcomb tells the chaplain that a C.I.D. man suspects him of

signing Washington Irving's name to official papers, and of stealing plum

tomatoes. The poor chaplain is very unhappy, helpless to improve anyone's

life.

Colonel Cathcart is preoccupied with the problem of Yossarian, who has

become a real black eye for him, most recently by complaining about the

number of missions, but previously by appearing naked at his own medal

ceremony shortly after Snowden's death. Colonel Cathcart wishes he knew how

to solve the problem and impress General Dreedle, his commanding officer.

General Dreedle doesn't care what his men do, as long as they remain

reliable military quantities. He travels everywhere with a buxom nurse, and

worries mostly about Colonel Moodus, his despised son in law, whom he

occasionally asks Chief White Halfoat to punch in the nose. Once Colonel

Korn tried to undercut Colonel Cathcart by giving a flamboyant briefing to

impress General Dreedle; General Dreedle told Colonel Cathcart that Colonel

Korn made him sick.

Chapters 22-26

Yossarian loses his nerve on the mission that follows Colonel Korn's

extravagant briefing, the mission where Snowden is killed and spattered all

over Yossarian's uniform when Dobbs goes crazy and seizes the plane's

controls from Huple. As he dies, Snowden pleads with Yossarian to help him;

he says he is cold. Dobbs is a terrible pilot and a wreck of a man, and he

later tells Yossarian he plans to kill Colonel Cathcart before he raises

the mission total again; he asks Yossarian to give him the go-ahead, but

Yossarian is unable to do so, so Dobbs abandons his plan. Yossarian thinks

that Dobbs is almost as bad as Orr, with whom Yossarian and Milo recently

took a trip to stock up on supplies. As they travel, Orr and Yossarian

gradually realize the extent of Milo's control over the black market and

vast international influence: he is the mayor of Palermo, the Assistant

Governor-General of Malta, the Vice-Shah of Oran, the Caliph of Baghdad,

the Imam of Damascus, the Sheik of Araby, and is worshipped as a god in

parts of Africa. Each region has embraced him because he revitalized their

economy with his syndicate, in which everybody has a share. Nevertheless,

throughout their trip, Orr and Yossarian are forced to sleep in the plane

while Milo enjoys lavish palaces, and they are finally awakened in the

middle of the night so that Milo can rush his shipment of red bananas to

their next stop.

One evening Nately finds his whore in Rome again after a long search.

He tries to convince Yossarian and Aarfy to take two of her friends for

thirty dollars each. Aarfy objects that he has never had to pay for sex.

Nately's whore is sick of Nately, and begins to swear at him; then Hungry

Joe arrives, and the group abandons Aarfy and goes to the apartment

building where the girls live. Here they find a seemingly endless flow of

naked young women; Hungry Joe is torn between taking in the scene and

rushing back for his camera. Nately argues with an old man who lives at the

building about nationalism and moral duty--the old man claims Italy is

doing better than America in the war because it has already been occupied,

so Italian boys are no longer being killed. He gleefully admits to swearing

loyalty to whatever nation happens to be in power. The patriotic,

idealistic Nately cannot believe his ears, and argues somewhat haltingly

for America's international supremacy and the values it represents. But he

is troubled because, though they are absolutely nothing alike, the old man

reminds him of his father.

By April, Milo's influence is massive. The mess officer controls the

international black market, plays a major role in the world economy, and

uses Air Force planes from countries all over the world to carry shipments

of his supplies; the planes are repainted with an "M & M Enterprises" logo,

but Milo continues to insist that everybody has a share in his syndicate.

Milo contracts with the Germans to bomb the Americans, and with the

Americans to shoot down German planes. German anti-aircraft guns contracted

by Milo even shot down Mudd, the dead man in Yossarian's tent, for which

Yossarian holds a grudge against Milo. Milo wants Yossarian's help

concocting a solution for unloading his massive holdings of Egyptian

cotton, which he cannot sell and which threatens to ruin his entire

operation. One evening after dinner, Milo's planes begin to bomb Milo's own

camp: He has landed another contract with the Germans, and dozens of men

are wounded and killed during the attack. Almost everyone wants to end M &

M Enterprises right then, but Milo shows them how much money they have all

made, and the survivors almost all forgive him. While Yossarian sits naked

in a tree watching Snowden's funeral, Milo seeks him out to talk to him

about the cotton; he gives Yossarian some chocolate-covered cotton and

tries to convince him it is really candy. Yossarian tells Milo to ask the

government to buy his cotton, and Milo is struck by the intelligence behind

the idea.

The chaplain is troubled. No one seems to treat him as a regular human

being; everyone is uncomfortable in his presence, he is intimidated by the

soldiers--especially Colonel Cathcart--and he is generally ineffectual as a

religious leader. He grows increasingly miserable, and is sustained solely

by the thought of the religious visions he has seen since his arrival, such

as the vision of the naked man in the tree at Snowden's funeral. Of course,

the naked man was Yossarian. He dreams of his wife and children dying

horribly in his absence. He tries to see Major Major about the number of

missions the men are asked to fly, but, like everyone else, finds that

Major Major will not allow him into his office except when he is out. On

the way to see Major Major a second time, the chaplain encounters Flume,

Chief White Halfoat's old roommate who is so afraid of having his throat

slit while he sleeps that he has taken to living in the forest. The

chaplain then learns that Corporal Whitcomb has been promoted to sergeant

by Colonel Cathcart for an idea that the colonel believes will land him in

the Saturday Evening Post. The chaplain tries to mingle with the men at the

officers' club, but Colonel Cathcart periodically throws him out. The

chaplain takes to doubting everything, even God.

The night Nately falls in love with his whore, she sits naked from the

waist down in a room full of enlisted men playing blackjack. She is already

sick of Nately, and tries to interest one of the enlisted men, but none of

them notice her. Nately follows her out, then to the officers' apartments

in Rome, where she tries the same trick on Nately's friends. Aarfy calls

her a slut, and Nately is deeply offended. Aarfy is the navigator of the

flight on which Yossarian is finally hit by flak; he is wounded in the leg

and taken to the hospital, where he and Dunbar change identities by

ordering lower-ranking men to trade beds with them. Dunbar pretends to be

A. Fortiori. Finally they are caught by Nurse Cramer and Nurse Duckett, who

takes Yossarian by the ear and puts him back to bed.

Chapters 27-31

The next morning, while Nurse Duckett is smoothing the sheets at the

foot of his bed, Yossarian thrusts his hand up her skirt. She shrieks and

rushes away, and Dunbar grabs her bosom from behind. When she is finally

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