The influence of Catch-22 on theater, film, and TV would be difficult to estimate. For example, although Robert Altman's film M*A*S*H appeared in theaters before the film version of Catch-22, its debt to Heller's 1961 novel is obvious, especially in its theme of trying to maintain sanity amidst the absurdity of war. Heller knew Ring Lardner, Jr., who wrote the screenplay very well and stated that Lardner knew Catch-22 very well.⁹⁹ The TV series of the same name continued the depiction of this theme. However, only three adaptations of the novel have been made: the 1970 film directed by Mike Nichols and two plays by Joseph Heller, the first entitled Catch-22: A Dramatization (1971) and the second Clevinger's Trial (1973).

CATCH-22, THE FILM (1970)

At the Poetry Center, Young Men's Hebrew Association, in New York City in December 1970, Joseph Heller began his remarks on the recently released film version of his novel with the following understatement: “The huge problem of translating Catch-22 to a film: I suppose this can be discussed from several points of view.”¹⁰⁰ He goes on to claim, “This sounds kind of surprising to many people, and perhaps even corrupt, but I really didn't give a damn what happened to it, once I sold it to Columbia Pictures and the first check cleared.”¹⁰¹ To mitigate the shock of such comments, he admits, “I didn't want to do a film script of Catch-22 because if I did work on it, I would have to be concerned with what came out, and I know that a scriptwriter has very little control.”¹⁰²

To translate a circular and repetitive plot with 40 characters of roughly equivalent prominence was certainly a challenge. The film studio Columbia had originally bought the film rights but sold them to Martin Ransohoff who got Mike Nichols to direct. The screen version was finally released nine years after the publication of the novel, and then only after Buck Henry, the scriptwriter, eliminated scene after scene from his 385-page first draft. (Each page of a film script typically translates to about a minute of screen time.)¹⁰³ It is easy to see why Henry had to cut so much. His task was to condense a nearly 500-page novel into a two-hour film!

Based upon the choices that Henry and Nichols made of what to keep, what to discard, what to rewrite, or (amazingly) what to invent, critics have either praised or panned the film. The praise is generally for the film's faithfulness to the novel, while the negative criticism is generally for its liberties.

The film opens to a quiet dawn with an occasional dog barking and bird chirping. The noise of propellers and a blinding white light breaks the tranquility. The camera pans to a bombed-out headquarters building with three men, Yossarian, Cathcart, and Korn, having an indistinct, virtually inaudible conversation. One man, Yossarian as played by Alan Arkin, leaves the building only to be stabbed in the back by an unknown assailant. As he falls to the ground, in the shadow of planes passing by, he has a flashback to another soldier's death. In fact, most of the film is Yossarian's flashbacks and flashbacks within flashbacks. This opening is quite unlike Heller's now-famous opening lines: “It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him” (15). By giving the film the framework of a flashback, Heller points out an important difference from the novel:

In the film, anything is permissible because it all can be explained in terms of an [sic] hallucination, a nightmare, by Yossarian, who is nearly dead and is reliving all this in terms of how events of the past cross his imagination, so none of it has to be literally true. … In the novel, everything that happens really does happen. Almost everything, except for a few things described as dreams.¹⁰⁴

Henry uses the flashbacks to evoke and recreate the circular movement of the novel. In the most effective use of flashback, the film returns again and again to Snowden's death scene, each time revealing a bit more of the mystery, and shrouds the scene in an eerie yellow-white light to distinguish it in texture and design from the rest of the film. Near the end of the film, the full scene of Snowden's death is finally played out. The whiteness of the scene contrasts with the awful, bloody mess of entrails that spill out over Yossarian. As Arkin plays the scene, his face contorted in a silent scream, we see his pathetic powerlessness when he finally is able to utter only, “There, there” to comfort the boy. This is the event that Yossarian struggles to understand throughout the novel and the film, and Henry teases the audience with partial glimpses of its significance that successfully reflect Yossarian's partial awareness—until the final comprehension that man is matter, blood and guts.

On the other hand, Henry and Nichols make other choices that are not nearly so faithful to the novel. They transform Milo Minderbinder from a black-mustachioed businessman to an Aryan Fascist played by Jon Voight who rides through the streets of Rome in Mussolini's actual Mercedes. Henry's Milo is concerned with dominating the world markets (if not the world), the embodiment of an evil profiteer. Heller's Milo is an innocent, a far cry from Mussolini:

My Milo Minderbinder tended to be a very moral person, a very innocent person—innocent to the extent that he is either unaware or indifferent to the consequences of his activities. … I was trying to portray my Milo Minderbinder as the essence of the materialistic ethic. … He is just motivated by profitable opportunities, and there is nothing externally malevolent or destructive about him. He has no real motivation towards power—towards domination.¹⁰⁵

In another interview, Heller clarifies his version of Milo:

He's not consciously evil. He may create bad things as a by-product of what he does, but he is unaware of it. He's not a show-off; he's not greedy. What is good for Milo often is good for the country. The troops did get fresh eggs.¹⁰⁶

It may be helpful to remember that Heller conceived of and created Milo in the late 1950s and early 1960s, whereas the film came out near the end of the Vietnam War. Henry may have been trying to make some political statements about the nature of the destructive, right-wing military professional who profits from war, and so made Milo an extreme, a Fascist (in some views, almost a cartoon), to emphasize his point.¹⁰⁷

In the film, before the audience sees Milo, they are treated to a view of an egg in his hand that fills nearly half the screen. Milo and Colonel Cathcart then discuss profiting from the sale of eggs while a plane crash-lands and bursts into flames. They continue to talk over the scream of the ambulances and drive off in the opposite direction of the crash, totally unconcerned with the fate of their own men. Later, Milo is further demonized and made even more culpable when Nately is killed in the air raid that Milo orchestrates on his own squadron. Milo unemotionally dismisses his death and says that Nately was simply a victim of the economic pressures of supply and demand: the Germans agreed to buy Milo's cotton if he bombed his own base.

This is another clear departure from Heller's intent. In the novel, Nately's death is more attributable to Yossarian's actions. In an effort to save Nately, who wants to fly more missions to stay close to Rome and the whore he loves, Yossarian asks Milo for help. Milo then asks Cathcart if he can fly more combat missions (he has five if the time he bombed his own squadron counts), only to conclude he is too indispensable to fly, so others in the squadron will have to pick up his slack. Cathcart consequently raises the number of missions to 80 to compensate for Milo's dearth of missions, Nately gets to stay overseas, and Nately's plane goes down on his very next mission—all inadvertent consequences of Yossarian's trying to help his friend stay alive. Thus, it is not so surprising after all when Nately's whore blames Yossarian for her lover's death, even though he cannot understand it until his sense of responsibility develops and matures near the end of the novel.

Heller would agree with Henry's conception of Cathcart, however, whom he sees as a truly evil person. To show Cathcart's complete crudeness and callousness, Henry invents a scene with Cathcart on the toilet as the Chaplain tries to talk to him! (At least, he washes his hands afterwards.) Henry also invents a gratuitous nude scene with Paula Prentiss as Nurse Duckett. She is on the dock and throws her clothes to Yossarian who is trying to swim towards her. He reaches her clothes but sinks. To quote Heller, “I don't understand.”¹⁰⁸

In addition, Henry loses the déjà vu theme so integral to the novel by minimizing the importance of the Chaplain (played in the film by Anthony Perkins). Instead of the haunting vision of the naked man in the tree that makes him question his view of reality again and again and leads him to eventually find meaning in his life, the Chaplain in the film glimpses something in a tree at Snowden's funeral, then gets a matter-of-fact pronouncement from Danby, “That's just Yossarian,” thus eliminating all the mystery. The Chaplain does not need to question a fact; he does not need to reevaluate his perception of a reality that impinges on his consciousness as déjà vu. It seems as if Henry were playing for a quick laugh instead of allowing the Chaplain to grow as a character, but then again with all the material to work with, he had to do some cutting.

Henry wisely chose not to cut the Eternal City part of Heller's novel. In extremely effective, nearly chiaroscuro cinematography, Yossarian wanders in this gray world as a distanced observer, still not seeing or thinking clearly, through the dark streets of Rome to see a sailor being rolled by children, a man getting beat, a horse being whipped, and the girl Aarfy has thrown out a window after he “only raped her once.” After an incredulous Yossarian is arrested for being AWOL while the murderer Aarfy is not even given a glance by the MPs, the film circles back to the beginning with Yossarian, Cathcart, and Korn in the headquarters building. This time, the conversation is clear. Yossarian is being offered a deal so that he can go home. As he leaves the building, Nately's whore stabs him, and Yossarian flashes back to Snowden's death for the last time. This time, however, he sees that he has dressed the wrong wound and that the boy is matter, just as Yossarian is.

The film then cuts to real time with Yossarian recovering in the hospital. After he learns that Orr has made it safely to Sweden, Yossarian decides to take a more active role in his destiny, to take more responsibility for himself, and deserts in a yellow dinghy. The camera pulls back and the film ends with Yossarian a solitary dot in the middle of the ocean.

When asked how he would rate the film adaptation of the novel, Heller replied:

Look, I think it's a better book than a film, if you're going to ask me that question. I would like to have seen this done (but it couldn't be done), that if this film were an Italian film by Fellini or Antonioni (and it came to this country with titles and we didn't have to use dialogue—all dialogue is bad in a film) I think every American critic who saw this film by Ingmar Bergman (or whoever else) would have hailed it as an unprecedented film masterpiece. Everybody would. It's because so many of the people, the reviewers, know the book so well that comparisons, I suppose, are inevitable, but I don't think they're valid. I judge it as a film. I can't think of any film I've seen in years, any American film, that I would put on the same level. I can think of a few European films. But that has to do with my taste, and I know what I like in films and I know what I like in novels. But if it's going to be compared with the book, then it suffers in just this inevitable way: I can't think of any film ever adapted from any work of literature that I or other people feel has any quality to it that even approaches the original work of literature that was its source.¹⁰⁹

CATCH-22: A DRAMATIZATION (1971)

The play Catch-22: A Dramatization, written by Heller and directed by Larry Arrick, was first performed at the John Drew Theater in East Hampton, New York, on July 13, 1971, and received laudatory reviews. The reviews particularly pleased Heller, since he was so conscientious about forestalling comments similar to those made by critics of the film. For example, Heller was often asked how the audience is supposed to know who stabs Yossarian in the opening scene of the film. This question bothered Heller to the point that he actually talked to the screenwriter, Buck Henry, about it. Henry said that it was not his intention to leave the identity of the would-be assassin vague.¹¹⁰ To prevent this question from surfacing in regards to his play, Heller has Nately's whore enter the scene about 20 lines before she attempts to kill him so that the audience has a clear idea of who the knife-wielding character is. In the final confrontation between Yossarian and her, she likewise enters the scene early to help with audience recognition.

But more had happened in the years between the novel and the play besides criticism of the film. As Heller points out in the foreword to his play, “By the time I went back to the play in 1971 the war in Viet Nam had been escalating openly for seven years, and the largest and most lethal belligerent in that devastating conflict was … us.”¹¹¹ He continues, “Thematically, in fact, the play is structured around such unchecked misuses of authority in an atmosphere of war.”¹¹² He then cites recent trials that are characterized, in his opinion, by the same unchecked misuses and abuses: Muhammed Ali, found guilty of violating the draft by refusing to go to Viet Nam; the Harrisburg 6, acquitted of conspiring to kidnap Henry Kissinger to protest the war; the Chicago 7, acquitted of conspiring to cross state lines to disturb the Democratic National Convention in 1968; and others.

In his foreword, then, Heller justifies the importance of trials to his play. After five lines of dialog, the Texan enters—a C.I.D. man involved in the undercover investigation of the person guilty of signing Washington Irving's name to censored letters. As Heller asks, “Preposterous? Of course. But any more preposterous than maintaining in court with a straight face that the Harrisburg group was seriously engaged in a plot to kidnap Henry Kissinger, a presidential aide, and blow up the underground heating system of Washington, D.C.?”¹¹³

Whether one agrees with his politics or not, Heller is just trying to explain the effect of current events upon the choices he made in cutting material from his novel to create his play:

What all these illustrations of due process gone awry have to do with the adaptation that follows [the play] may seem somewhat remote. Reference to them, however, may help explain several of the fundamental choices made in taking subject matter from a complicated and perhaps rather long novel published ten years earlier for use in a play that must by necessity be shorter, swifter, simpler, and more direct.¹¹⁴

In other words, he wanted his material not only to reflect the times, but also to take advantage of them.

Unfortunately, his efforts to reflect the insanity and preposterousness of the times frequently play to big laughs from the audience. As he admits, “if anything, the play possibly was ‘too funny,’ a bit more humorous in that first presentation than either I or Arrick had intended or would have wished.”¹¹⁵ Despite the inadvertently, often too humorous adaptation of the novel, his play is very important as it outlines what Heller saw as integral to his conception of Catch-22. In other words, Heller exploits this second chance, as it were, and condenses and conflates to reveal what he thinks is most essential to his theme.

The play opens with the Chaplain writing a letter: “Dear wife. In the hospital today I met a likable young man … ” and Yossarian enters.¹¹⁶ Like the movie, the play departs from the famous opening of the novel; however, the play at least focuses on the same two characters. The Chaplain continues, “ … who has a very simple wish. He wants to live forever.”¹¹⁷ And Yossarian finishes that thought, “Or at least die in the attempt.”¹¹⁸ Heller immediately foregrounds the central struggle in Yossarian's character. Intruding on Yossarian's lines, the Texan enters. Here, he is a C.I.D. man who is investigating the great crime of signing “Washington Irving” to censored letters. Again, Heller quickly wants the audience to see the insanity of the situation. In this quick-paced play, the audience is not allowed to be lulled into any sort of complacency. In fact, that is precisely what Heller is battling: he is shattering any illusion of sanity and traditional order the audience might hold.

Heller also uses the play to make clear any questions that critics may have had about the novel. For example, Clevinger plainly identifies Yossarian as an Assyrian. To make sure that the significance of this statement is fully understood, Clevinger explains that Assyrians are extinct—except, obviously, for Yossarian. Heller chose this nationality for Yossarian to make him both and outsider and an everyman, and he does not want this fact to be glossed over or missed. His hero is not an atypical case, but a representative of the human condition.

Heller likewise uses the play to emphasize characters or scenes that critics of the novel may have overlooked. Wintergreen becomes more noticeably prominent as the controller of communication. He could simply print up orders canceling the bomb run on Bologna—and it would be cancelled as quickly and easily as that—but he will not, preferring to make a profit off his cigarette lighters and compete with Milo. The fish dream sequence with Major Sanderson is highlighted in the play as well. Sanderson pronounces his patient to be crazy and therefore to be sent home, but he mistakenly thinks Yossarian is named Fortiori, so the wrong soldier is discharged.

Perhaps most importantly, Heller retains the Chaplain's interrogation or trial scene. Heller had been disappointed that no trials appeared in the movie, and with all the recent trials covered in the press, he was unwilling to sacrifice such an important and timely scene. When a bewildered Chaplain asks what crime he has committed, the Investigating Major replies, “We don't know yet. But we sure know it's serious. Please make yourself comfortable.”¹¹⁹ How can the Chaplain be comfortable if he is being charged with something serious? And how can it be a serious charge if no one knows what it is? The absurdity of his statements continue as he questions the Chaplain about censoring letters as Washington Irving and stealing a plum tomato from Cathcart. Once he is found guilty, the Major tells him, “Get the hell out of here”¹²⁰ without pronouncing punishment. Perhaps suffering through the insanity of a mock trial is punishment enough in Heller's view.

On the other hand, Nately's prominence and that of the Satanic Old Man are diminished. Nately does not even appear until Act 2 and his exchanges with the Old Man are virtually excised. Heller's focus here is clearly not on America and war and how Italy will survive, but on the individual and his representative experience—and that individual is Yossarian. Perhaps the time limitations inherent to the genre may have affected his choices. In fact, Nately reveals his age to be 19, then exits to make love to his whore, and literally the next minute Yossarian announces that he is dead. This swift juxtaposition of life and death is shocking not only to the audience but to Nately's whore—she just as quickly tries to kill the bearer of the bad news. In this case, Heller uses the time limitations of the genre to his advantage.

But he also loses the sense of Yossarian's culpability in Nately's death. In the novel, Yossarian tries to stop Nately from flying more missions to stay with his whore and asks Milo for help; he in turn goes to Cathcart. This event triggers Cathcart's raising the number of missions, and Nately is killed on his very next flight, so there is a kind of cause and effect. In the play, Yossarian embarrasses Milo into asking Cathcart if he can fly more missions only after Nately is dead. Although the Chaplain says that “we” did not save Nately, Yossarian is not so implicated in the death as he is in the novel—except by Nately's whore's constant attempts on his life.

Because Heller cannot allow actions to unfold or character to develop over time as he could in a lengthy novel, he takes little for granted in the play. For instance, Heller has Milo bluntly point out that Yossarian uses the hospital as an escape. Moreover, the character of Cathcart, always preoccupied with figurative black eyes and feathers in his cap in the novel, literally comes on stage not only with a black eye, but also with an Indian headdress complete with feathers! The props and makeup help with the characterization in this case quite clearly.

Just as the depiction of Cathcart is exaggerated on stage, so the depiction of the death of young men is understated, but to great effect. The deaths of Nately and McWatt occur offstage and are reported, much as happens in ancient drama, until the end of the play when Snowden dies onstage. Having this young man die onstage after the others have died offstage intensely focuses the audience's attention on the significance of this event. The audience may have taken the other deaths as natural occurrences of war, some of the countless victims who merge into one collective tragedy. There were similar nightly news reports on the numbers killed in the Vietnam War. But Heller wants the audience to finally experience a death in all its terror and absurdity.

Snowden has no morphine to dull the pain because Milo has replaced it with a piece of paper that reads “What's good for Milo Minderbinder is good for the country.”¹²¹ Milo's business antics may have been funny before, but the horror of what he has done becomes painfully clear now. A young boy suffers needlessly before his inevitable death, and Yossarian can only offer comfort with the words, “There, there.”¹²² After Snowden dies, Yossarian explains to the Chaplain:

There was God's plenty, all right—liver, lungs, kidneys, ribs, stomach, and bits of the stewed tomatoes Snowden had eaten that day for lunch.¹²³

He continues:

It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret.¹²⁴

Yossarian verbally paints the awful death for us and concludes with the explication of Snowden's secret: “Ripeness is all,”¹²⁵ to quote Hamlet. This secret leads Yossarian to break the deal he had made to go home. He will not join Cathcart and Korn and be their pal. He decides to run away to Sweden. However, since the character of Nately's whore's kid sister is not in the play, Heller cuts out the detail that Yossarian is not running away, but running to responsibility. In the play, Yossarian will live without capitulating to the insane establishment represented by Cathcart. Not only does he change, but the Chaplain experiences an epiphany as well. He will persevere in the face of the absurdity and even punches Cathcart in the nose (as he reports in a letter to his wife), unafraid of the consequences. Just as the play opens with the Chaplain writing to his wife, so it ends.

Perhaps Heller's play is not “too funny,” after all. By juxtaposing comedy and tragedy, the horror is intensified in contrast with the vaudevillian elements. Just as Shakespeare used comic scenes in Macbeth to relieve tension and stun the audience with the violence surrounding them, so Heller employs the same tactic. The shock of Snowden's death is much more forceful because it comes after so much humor. His death also tinges the preceding humor with a darkness that asks the audience to reevaluate their experience. There is nothing funny about death, and this is precisely the reason Yossarian wants to live forever. His efforts to do so in the face of such tragedy and meaninglessness are heroic. After all, why does Snowden die? So that Cathcart can get his name in a magazine? Heller thus distills his novel into a very effective play, but it still pales in comparison with his masterpiece.

CLEVINGER'S TRIAL (1973)

When Heller saw the film version of Catch-22, he was disappointed that none of his trial scenes appeared. In an effort to correct what, in his view, was a huge omission, he wrote Clevinger's Trial as a one-act play, which is basically a dramatization of Chapter 8, “Lieutenant Scheisskopf,” of Catch-22. It begins as a flashback, with Clevinger walking his penalty tours at cadet school. In other words, it is a foregone conclusion that Clevinger has been pronounced guilty of his crimes—there is no dramatic tension as to the outcome. He has been tried and sentenced. What is interesting is how he gets to this point.

Despite Yossarian's caution that Scheisskopf really does not want to know why morale is low, Clevinger tells the Lieutenant anyway: the cadets do not want to march in parades and they would like to elect their own officers instead of having Scheisskopf appoint them. Clevinger immediately incurs the wrath of Scheisskopf and is put on trial. The Colonel in charge cowers everyone in his presence as he prosecutes not only Clevinger, but Scheisskopf, Metcalf, and Popinjay as well. In Popinjay's case, he irritates the Colonel so much that the Colonel pronounces that his trial will begin as soon as Clevinger's ends—although the audience realizes that Clevinger's is already over. He is in an impossible situation as he is asked to repeat what he did or did not say, only to be told that they are really just interested in what he did not say. Clevinger is manipulated into pleading, “I didn't always say you couldn't find me guilty, sir,” but even that does not satisfy the court because nothing he says could ever satisfy the court. When he brings up justice, the Colonel responds with a ludicrous and martial example that confounds sense. Clevinger was guilty or else he would not have been accused.

In the end, Scheisskopf is promoted to Major, Metcalf is shipped to the Solomon Islands to dig graves, Popinjay goes to jail, and Clevinger returns to marching his tours as he did at the play's start. The play has come full circle and is back in present time; the flashback is over. Yossarian joins him on the stage, and Clevinger (in front of Scheisskopf and the Colonel) states that the real enemies are the officers in charge. Yossarian marches with Clevinger to have their conversation, and then takes up his own rifle. It is clear to the audience that he is joining his friend in his punishment tours. It appears as if it is curtains for the two as the curtain falls and the play ends.

Heller thus dramatizes the conclusion of Chapter 8 in Catch-22 very effectively. In the novel, Yossarian tells Clevinger that “They hate Jews,” to which Clevinger weakly responds that he is not Jewish (90). Yossarian points out that it makes no difference, since “they” are after everybody. Heller concludes the chapter with this paragraph:

Clevinger recoiled from their hatred as though from a blinding light. These three men who hated him spoke his language and wore his uniform, but he saw their loveless faces set immutably into cramped, mean lines of hostility and understood instantly that nowhere in the world, not in all the fascist tanks or planes or submarines, not in the bunkers behind the machine guns or mortars or behind the blowing flame throwers, not even among all the expert gunners of the crack Hermann Goering Antiaircraft Division or among the grisly connivers in all the beer halls in Munich and everywhere else, were there men who hated him more.

(90-91)

In the play, Clevinger gets to make the point that he recognizes the enemy in his superiors—and they can hear him—but this revelation makes no difference. He still must continue his march. And Yossarian joins him. Perhaps Heller is diverting from the novel to make the point that no one is safe from such insanity—even a more experienced and cynical character like Yossarian. (Remember that the play was published in 1973 after the trials of Muhammed Ali, the Chicago 7, etc.)

CATCH-22 AS STUDIED

In his review entitled “The Catch,” Nelson Algren unwittingly predicted many of the works that would come to be studied in conjunction with Catch-22: The Naked and the Dead, From Here to Eternity, and The Good Soldier Svejk. In addition to these war novels, Catch-22 is often studied with Going After Cacciato, as well as the poetry of Randall Jarrell and Wilfred Owen, to name but a few. Certain sections of the novel also merit comparisons with the epics The Iliad and Paradise Lost, as well as the dramas Julius Caesar and Macbeth. The following discusses Catch-22 in conjunction with these works that are similar by genre, literary movement, or theme.¹²⁶

WAR NOVELS

The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer:

Whereas Catch-22 deals with the war in Europe, The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer is set in the Pacific Theater on a fictitious island called Anopopei. Neither novel deals with the enemy as a present threat (although of course they are always there as evidenced by the flak, etc.); rather the enemy is us. Mailer focuses on a handful of characters: Major General Cummings, a manipulator questing for glory at any cost; Lieutenant Hearn who is aware of Cummings' psychological and political games and tries to subvert them; and Sergeant Croft, the real leader of the troops, whose insubordination (because of his jealousy) gets Hearn killed. While these men are squabbling to disastrous personal results, other units in the war win the actual battle. Cummings then capitalizes on the victory—a victory earned while he is not even on the island—although to his great chagrin he may have to congratulate or even promote the officer who played a major role in the battle. Mailer also uses a structural technique similar to the one that Heller employs to break the narrative flow. As James H. Meredith puts it:

The ‘time machine’ chapters are the feature through which the novel tells the full story of these men. In these various interluding chapters, the reader discovers he pre-war lives of the characters—their backgrounds, fears, joys, and disappointments. Bitterly honest and highly developed, The Naked and the Dead tells the naked truth about the harsh reality of World War II and the flawed men who fought it.¹²⁷

Although Heller's novel is antirealistic and Mailer's is realistic (emphasizing a truthful and authentic representation of events in a straightforward narrative), both works share similar themes. Like Cummings, Colonel Cathcart is only out for his own glory and fame at any price. Neither character values the lives of the men under his command. Like Hearn, Yossarian recognizes the mania of his commanding officer, but Heller's character survives the confrontation. Yossarian's belief that everyone is out to get him, even those on his own side, echoes Mailer's novel.

From Here to Eternity by James Jones:

This novel is set in Hawaii just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and is based on James Jones's experiences as a serviceman in the U.S. Army (just as Catch-22 is based on Heller's experience as a bombardier in Italy). Since the attack has not yet occurred at the novel's beginning, the United States is not yet at war, so as with the novels of Heller and Mailer, the enemy is not necessarily the Axis powers: the soldiers in Jones' novel spend most of their time fighting each other.

The main characters are Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt who killed a man in the boxing ring and Sergeant Milton Anthony Warden, a cynical military career man. Prewitt witnesses the murder of a fellow soldier, then murders the killer, and goes AWOL, only to be killed by MPs who mistake him for an infiltrator. (His rebellion against authority and injustice does not end as well as Yossarian's.) Warden has an affair with the company commander's wife Karen, and then turns down an officer's commission since he does not want to be an elite Army gentleman. After the affair ends, Karen goes back to the mainland and finds a new prospect on the ship. Warden literally sees the face of the Japanese enemy as he shoots down their planes, but still has to combat and overcome his own inner problems. As with Catch-22, the worst enemies seem to be the soldiers themselves and the bureaucracy.

The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Haslev:

The Good Soldier Svejk was written by the Czech author Jaroslav Haslev after World War I. He had been taken prisoner on the Eastern Front and spent several years in Russian prison camps. He had intended to write six volumes about Svejk, but he died in 1923 with only four volumes written. In his “Preface,” he describes his hero:

Today you can meet in the streets of Prague a shabbily dressed man who is not even himself aware of his significance in the history of the great new era. He goes modestly on his way, without bothering anyone. Nor is he bothered by journalists asking for an interview. If you asked him his name he would answer you simply and unassumingly: “I am Svejk …”

And this quiet, unassuming, shabbily dressed man is indeed that heroic and valiant good old soldier Svejk. In Austrian times his name was once on the lips of all the citizens of the Kingdom of Bohemia, and in the Republic his glory will not fade either.

I am very fond of the good soldier Svejk and in relating his adventures during the world war I am convinced that this modest, anonymous hero will win the sympathy of all of you.¹²⁸

However, Svejk is not a typical hero, but rather an antihero like Yossarian. Svejk bumbles his way through the war, although he was once officially declared an idiot, completely self-interested in his survival. He takes literalness to the level of art to confound his superiors and their loony bureaucracy with his “innocent” passive aggression. Haslev creates a surfeit of comrades and enemies for Svejk, not to mention several hilarious situations, as Heller does for Yossarian. Like Yossarian, Svejk uses the system that has sent him to war to his advantage (both even frequent the hospitals for some safety and peace), but Svejk persists in his rebellion from the start, helping others only when it can also benefit him. He has no great epiphany wherein he takes responsibility for others—he has a hard enough time taking care of himself and all his excesses, especially good food and good liquor.

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut:

On the night of February 13, 1945, 773 RAF Lancaster bombers attacked Dresden, Germany—a city of little military importance and filled with refugees from the Eastern Front. On the next two days, the Eighth Air Force followed up with daylight attacks that used a total of 600 American planes. The city was destroyed in a vast firestorm that took the lives of approximately 70,000 people. (Estimates range from 30,000 to 200,000 dead.)

Kurt Vonnegut was held captive by the Germans and witnessed the annihilation of Dresden firsthand. His dark novel is based in part on his World War II experiences, but his satire takes on a universal, transcendent significance. His protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, is an American prisoner-of-war (POW) when the bombing occurs, who becomes a time and space traveler after his alien abduction. He also becomes captive on the planet Tralfamadore, but nothing in the universe is so alien as the bombing of Dresden. Billy is an outsider (emphasized by his unique time traveling abilities) like Yossarian who has witnessed the insanity of war. However, Billy's experience is not limited to this world, and this fact emphasizes the complete incomprehensibility of war.

More importantly, there is a clear difference between the actions of Yossarian and Billy. Yossarian chooses to run away to responsibility in order to effect some sort of change, not only for himself but for Nately's whore's kid sister. Billy, on the other hand, can effect no change. Although he travels back in time before the bombing, he is powerless to change anything. In other words, while Heller protests against the absurdity, Vonnegut is more accepting—not happily accepting, but accepting nonetheless.

Going After Cacciato by Tim O'Brien:

Tim O'Brien served in Vietnam from 1969 to 1970. His novel Going After Cacciato (which won the 1979 National Book Award) is a blend of realism and fantasy that follows one soldier's decision to leave the jungles of war and head for the civilization of Paris. Or does it? O'Brien weaves three different storylines together: Cacciato's desertion and its consequences, the observation post, and the combat memories. Perhaps Cacciato's flight is just in the imagination of the main character Paul Berlin. Even the outcome of his flight, if it is real, is uncertain. However, O'Brien does not allow the reader to doubt for one moment the reality of the war. The novel opens with a listing of casualties in all their specificity and ends with a dim sense that is almost hope—a sense that kept the American soldiers in the Vietnam War going and made them heroic, if not heroes.

Heller employs a similar blending of storylines in his novel, as well as a blending of horror and comedy. However, he ends his novel on a positive note with the Chaplain's decision to survive and Yossarian's decision to desert. O'Brien, writing after the Vietnam era, couches the possibilities for desertion in terms of a dream—not something that a soldier actually does, but something he fantasizes about doing. The courage is in the staying, whereas for Yossarian it is in the leaving.

WAR POETRY

“Dulce Et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen:

Wilfred Owen wrote “Dulce Et Decorum Est” as he was recovering from shell shock in Craiglockhart, a Scottish hospital, during World War I. While there, he met another poet, Siegfried Sassoon, who encouraged his writing and told him that his war experience would help his poetry. Owen returned to the front only to be killed a week before the Armistice, so Sassoon posthumously published his friend's poetry in 1920. Like Heller, Owen used his own war experience in his writing. As a result, his poems are not sentimental or patriotic; rather, he focuses on “pity,” to use his own word—the emotional reality of the horrible experience—much as Heller does in his depiction of Yossarian's response to Snowden's death.

The poem deals with a gas attack at the front. The soldiers are not glorious heroes, but bent like old beggars and coughing like hags. When the gas is thrown, they struggle to get the masks on in time, but one boy is unsuccessful and drowns in the thick air in agony. This image haunts the speaker, much as Snowden haunts Yossarian, and the speaker realizes the irony that “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (sweet and fitting it is to die for one's country) is a lie. Just as Yossarian does not want to die for Colonel Cathcart's desire to get in The Saturday Evening Post, so the speaker in the poem does not want to die for an empty and grossly untrue statement. There is no heroism in dying; man is matter and death reveals it in all its blood and guts.

“The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” by Randall Jarrell:

Randall Jarrell enlisted in the Army Air Corps in 1942, but washed out as a pilot. He subsequently served as a control tower operator. His war poetry suggests the murderousness of war. In other words, he personalizes the war much like Yossarian does. In his five-line poem, “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” he compresses the experience of death in war. It is narrated in the first person from the gunner's point of view. His extreme youth is emphasized since he falls into the depersonalized “State” from his mother's sleep. In fact, the imagery describes him as a fetus in the womb of the plane. He awakes from his peace in life to war and flak, and when he dies he is washed out of the turret—a terrible abortion. As with Owen and Heller, the reader is shocked with the reality of death in war. This young man does not get a chance in life; he is taken by the war and flushed out of the plane since so little of his physical presence remains. Man is indeed matter—and sometimes not even much of it is left.

EPICS

The Iliad by Homer:

Both Catch-22 and Homer's Iliad begin in medias res, but the similarity does not end there. The Iliad has an opening scene that resonates throughout Catch-22. Agamemnon thinks that Achilles has tried to outwit him over a slave girl. Achilles responds by saying that he has no quarrel with the Trojans and is only there because of Agamemnon, and since the leader has insulted him, he will leave. Agamemnon makes no attempt to keep him there, and just as Achilles wrestles with thoughts of either killing the king or checking his own anger, Minerva intervenes and tells him to spare the king, although Achilles continues to rage.

Thus, both Achilles and Yossarian refuse to fight because they are upset at their commanders who are full of pride. But whereas Achilles gets divine intervention to help in his decision-making, Yossarian has to learn the hard way by experiencing Snowden's death. Moreover, Achilles is a hero (flawed but still a hero) with great strength and battle skills. Yossarian is an antihero who constantly fears for his safety, though he arguably becomes heroic when he decides to help Nately's whore's kid sister.

Paradise Lost by John Milton:

The scene with Yossarian sitting naked in the tree at Snowden's funeral recalls the temptation of Eve in John Milton's Paradise Lost. In fact, Yossarian even claims that the tree is not only the tree of life, but of knowledge of good and evil. But Heller inverts and subverts the serious theme of mans fall by couching it in terms of business. Is impersonal, if not inhumane, business the downfall of humankind?

Just as Satan in the guise of the serpent tempts Eve with a better existence, so Milo Minderbinder tempts Yossarian with the chocolate-covered cotton to give his M&M Enterprises a better financial existence. But Yossarian refuses to swallow the cotton or the line that Milo is feeding him about what is good for the country. By refusing to join Milo's plot to recoup his losses on the Egyptian cotton, Yossarian inadvertently brings death to the squadron when Milo bombs his own men so that the Germans will take the cotton crop off his hands. Thus, the fruit brings ultimate death to Eve, and the cotton (albeit refused) brings potential death to the squadron.

In an interesting reversal, however, Yossarian tempts the tempter by suggesting that Milo sell the cotton crop to the U.S. government. Milo is indeed intrigued by this possibility, especially when Yossarian adds that Milo could easily bribe the government into buying it. When Milo questions how that is possible, Yossarian simply explains that when bribes are involved, the government will find him. Thus, Heller couches the temptation story in terms of corrupt business deals and subverts not only Paradise Lost, but also the Genesis story upon which the epic is based.

DRAMA

Heller makes frequent allusions to several Shakespearean plays. Yossarian's delay in making a decision recalls Hamlet's delay in murdering his uncle, and the revelation that Yossarian has that ripeness was all is a paraphrase of Edgar's “ripeness is all” from King Lear. However, perhaps the two plays that figure most notably overall in Catch-22 are Macbeth and Julius Caesar. Heller's juxtaposition of the hilarity and horror suggests Shakespeare's effective alternation of comic and tragic scenes in Macbeth, and the attempted assassination of Colonel Cathcart evokes the assassination of Caesar.

Macbeth by William Shakespeare:

The so-called Porter scene in Macbeth occurs just before the discovery of the bodies of the murdered victims. The comedy of the drunken porter therefore works to heighten our sense of horror at what is soon to be revealed. The porter jokes and complains of his hangover and evokes a nervous laughter in the audience, but his words are thematically relevant to the whole play. For example, he talks of treason and uses a series of antitheses. His reference to treason suggests precisely what Macbeth and Lady Macbeth have committed in the murders, and his antitheses (for example, “provokes” and “unprovokes,” “sets on” and “takes off,” “persuades” and “disheartens”) suggest Macbeth's wrestling with oppositions of whether or not to do the deadly deed and Lady Macbeth's antithetical behavior (a murderous rather than nurturing mother who would dash her suckling baby's brains out, if she had so sworn, who becomes an insane weakling that cannot wash the blood from her hands).

Catch-22 also uses comedy to heighten the horror of its subject matter. Although some scenes, such as Clevinger's trial, are hilarious in their idiocy, they are also horrible in their message. Scheisskopf serves as prosecutor, defense counsel, and even one of the judges at the trial, and Clevinger is pronounced guilty of trying to improve morale at the Scheisskopf's request. This scene points to the supreme injustice of the court system that would twist an innocent man's words and condemn him without cause. In addition, the moaning scene, where Danby is so focused on synchronizing watches that he does not hear Dreedle's order against moaning and moans, is incredibly funny until Dreedle orders Danby to be shot. Danby faints in reaction to this fatal pronouncement and is saved only when Dreedle's son-in-law informs him that he is not allowed to have a man shot for moaning. The threat of death is ever-present, as Yossarian is well aware. The comedy only shocks the reader by contrast with the tragedy.

Comparisons can also be made between Lady Macbeth's bloody hands and her obsessive efforts to get the spot out and Yossarian's bloody hands scene with Snowden. The reality of death shocks Lady Macbeth into insanity (especially since she also perpetrated or instigated multiple murders). She has taken lives and cannot bear the guilt. Yossarian, on the other hand, has tried desperately to forestall not only his own death but also that of young Snowden. The boy's death shocks Yossarian into a clearer understanding of his own sanity and that man is matter. The graphic scenes in both Shakespeare and Heller reinforce the fact that ripeness is indeed all.

Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare:

The events leading up to the assassination of Julius Caesar closely parallel the events leading up to the attempted assassination of Colonel Cathcart. Brutus, an honorable man just as Yossarian is in his own way, is distressed that Caesar may be chosen king of the republic—a complete incongruity. Cassius plays on Brutus's sense of honor in manipulating him to help in the assassination. Cassius says that Caesar has made himself a god, a Colossus to his petty underlings. Brutus admits that he has some suspicions about Caesar's intentions, but entreats Cassius not to act at present. He learns of the show that Caesar put on to incite the crowds to beg him to be crowned, and decides to talk further of their intentions. Brutus knows they must take a bloody course, yet he wants to spare Antony so that they do not look like butchers but like sacrificers who purged Rome of a great evil.

When Dobbs broaches the subject of murdering Cathcart to Yossarian, Yossarian's first reaction is “You want us to kill him in cold blood?” (236). Like Brutus, Yossarian is initially hesitant, but all Dobbs wants is for him to give the go-ahead. Just as Cassius needs an honorable man like Brutus to legitimize the murder, so Dobbs needs his friend's approval to legitimize his cause. Dobbs then suggests killing more and more people, but Yossarian objects to the bloodbath much as Brutus did. The irony of this interesting parallel of drama and novel is that Yossarian talks Dobbs out of the murder only to change his mind and later ask for Dobbs's assistance. Since Dobbs has finished his missions and thinks he can go home, he is no longer interested in getting rid of Cathcart. He is completely self-interested, as was Cassius, and only insists on murder when it would benefit him personally. Luckily for Yossarian, he abandons the idea of assassination, despite the fact that Cathcart has volunteered the group once again for Bologna to get another feather in his cap. Yossarian would rid the squadron of this evil, but he will not proceed without his co-conspirators. The squadron therefore has to live under the tyrannical rule of their show-off of a commander who persists in raising the number of missions, while Rome eliminated hers but had to fight to survive the ultimately misguided murder. Cold-blooded murder, despite the cause, is still murder.

Notes

1. James Nagel, “The Catch-22 Note Cards,” Studies in the Novel 8 (1976): 394-405.

2. James Nagel, “Two Brief Manuscript Sketches: Heller's Catch-22,” Modern Fiction Studies 20 (1974): 221-224.

3. This ad appeared in the August 15, 1962, New York Times.

4. For a complete study of the publishing history of Catch-22, see Jonathan R. Eller, “Catching a Market: The Publishing History of Catch-22,” Prospects 17 (1992): 475-525.

5. Joseph Heller, “Preface to the special edition of Catch-22,” in Catch-22. New York: Simon & Schuster Inc., 1994, 10.

6. Kathi A. Vosevich, “Conversations with Joseph Heller,” War, Literature & the Arts, Volume 11, Number 2 (Fall-Winter 1999): 94.

7. See Chapter 2 for more information on the blotter.

8. Richard B. Sale, “An Interview in New York with Joseph Heller,” Studies in the Novel 4 (1972), 63.

9. “I See Everything Twice! The Structure of Joseph Heller's Catch-22,” University Review 34, 1968, 177.

10. The plot summary relies heavily on Heller's blotter.

11. Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 228-229.

12. Ibid., 37-38.

13. Ibid., 74-75.

14. One important piece of information about the J model that is of particular interest to Catch-22 was the incorporation of armor plating protection for the bombardier. See Steve Pace, B-25 Mitchell (Osceola, WI: Motorbooks International, 1994), 50.

15. Tilting at Mortality: Narrative Strategies in Joseph Heller's Fiction. (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1997), 40.

16. Kathi A. Vosevich, “Conversations with Joseph Heller,” War, Literature & the Arts, Volume 11, Number 2 (Fall-Winter 1999): 95, 100-101.

17. Round the World with the 488th Bombardment Squadron: Africa, Oceania, Corsica, Europe, India by Everitt B. Thomas, 134.

18. Ibid., 138.

19. Ibid., 140.

20. Now and Then, 175.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid., 176.

23. Ibid., 176-177. Heller also states that he learned a very useful phrase for his visits to the officers' apartment in Rome: “Quanto costa?” (177)

24. Ibid., 177.

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid., 178.

27. Ibid., 177-181.

28. Ibid., 201.

29. Ibid., 167.

30. Personal interview with Kathi Vosevich in New York, December 1998.

31. Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (New York: Simon & Schuster, [1961] 1994), 27. All subsequent quotations of this text come from this source.

32. Vosevich, 95.

33. Articles have also been written on themes such as the abuse of power, the mindlessness of the American press, man as a toy on a string, the insanity of the world, miscommunication and the debasement of language, déjà vu, and the wasteland of American culture, among others.

34. “The Catch-22 Note Cards,” Studies in the Novel 8 (1976): 399-400.

35. Ibid., 403-404.

36. Quoted in Nagel, 54-55.

37. Vosevich, 96.

38. Vosevich, 94.

39. Quoted in Nagel, 395.

40. Perhaps Heller wanted to avoid overt comparisons with Hemingway's Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises.

41. Nagel, 398.

42. Nagel, 404.

43. See Heller, “Catch-18,” New World Writing 7 (1955), 204-214, for the full version of the chapter.

44. Sam Merrill, “Playboy Interview: Joseph Heller,” in Conversations with Joseph Heller, ed. Adam J. Sorkin (Jackson: UP of MS, 1993), 170.

45. Ibid.

46. Heller, “Catch-18,” 211.

47. Heller had chosen the name “R.C. Shipman,” but a typesetting error made it “R.O. Shipman” and precipitated the problems with the real R.O. Shipman. See Jonathan R. Eller, “Catching a Market: The Publishing History of Catch-22.” Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies 17, 507.

48. Ibid., 507-508. Heller chose another seven-letter name to avoid the problem of having to reset the entire book.

49. Heller, “Catch-18,” 211.

50. Craig, 263.

51. See Chapter 10 for a full explanation of the historical events.

52. Vosevich, 91-92.

53. Quoted in Eller, 480.

54. Merrill, 68.

55. For one rendition of the interaction between Nately and his father, see “Love, Dad,” by Joseph Heller in Frederick Kiley and Walter McDonald, eds., A “Catch-22” Casebook (New York: Crowell, 1973), 309-316.

56. Eller, 483.

57. “Catch-22: A Radical Protest against Absurdity,” Contemporary American Novelists of the Absurd (New Haven: College and University Press, 1971), 38.

58. Paul Krassner, “An Impolite Interview with Joseph Heller,” in Sorkin, 26.

59. Interestingly, Joseph McCarthy was an intelligence officer during World War II.

60. Joan Robertson, “They're After Everyone: Heller's Catch-22 and the Cold War,” Clio 19:1 1989, 50.

61. Quoted in “New Questions Dog ‘Catch-22,’” Michael Mewshaw, Special to the Washington Post, April 27, 1998, A01.

62. Ibid.

63. Ibid.

64. Ibid.

65. Falstein, Face of a Hero (South Royalton, VT: Steerforth Press, 1998, first published in 1950 by Harcourt, Brace and Company), 1.

66. Ibid., 142.

67. Krassner, 22-23.

68. “The Loony Horror of It All—‘Catch-22’ Turns 25,” The New York Times Book Review, 26 October 1986, 3.

69. Granville Hicks, Saturday Review, 44 (1961), 33.

70. Richard G. Stern, The New York Times Book Review (Oct. 22, 1961), 50.

71. Nelson Algren, Nation, 193 (Nov. 4, 1961), 358.

72. Robert Brustein, The New Republic, 145 (Nov. 13, 1961), 13.

73. Whitney Balliett, The New Yorker, 9 Dec 1961, 248.

74. Julian Mitchell, The Spectator (London), Vol. 208 (June 15, 1962), 801.

75. Philip Toynbee, “Here's Greatness—in Satire,” The Observer (London), June 17, 1962, np.

76. Roger H. Smith, Daedalus (Winter, 1963), 161.

77. Aldridge, 3.

78. The complete criteria for diagnosing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder can be found in Joseph M. Flora's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

79. Eller, 502-503.

80. Ibid., 513.

81. Newsweek, Vol 60 (October 1, 1962), 82.

82. Merrill, 170.

83. “Joseph Heller on America's ‘Inhuman Callousness,’” U.S. News & World Report, 9 April 1979, 73.

84. “22 Was Funnier Than 14,” The New York Times Book Review, March 3, 1968, 49.

85. Ibid., 53.

86. Merrill, 170.

87. Thomas L. Hartshorne, “From Catch-22 to Slaughterhouse V: The Decline of the Political Mode,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 1978, 24.

88. Ibid., 23-24.

89. Aldridge, 3.

90. Conversations with American Writers. “Joseph Heller. Charles Ruas. 154.

91. “Joseph Heller Draws Dead Bead on the Politics of Gloom.”

92. Merrill, 170.

93. Chet Flippo, “Checking In with Joseph Heller,” in Sorkin, 233.

94. Aldridge, 3.

95. Ibid.

96. “Joseph Heller,” Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1999. Edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli. (Detroit: Gale, 2000), 122.

97. Craig, 83-84.

98. “Catch-22 Revisited,” in Kiley, 331-332.

99. Brother Alexis Gonzales, “Notes on the Next Novel: An Interview with Joseph Heller,” in Sorkin, 94.

100. Heller, “On Translating Catch-22 into a Movie,” in Kiley 346.

101. Ibid., 346-347.

102. Ibid., 347.

103. Ibid., 358.

104. Vosevich, 96.

105. Ibid., 94.

106. It is interesting to note that in a 1970 interview right after the film opened in theaters, Heller was more cautious in his criticism of the characterization of Milo Minderbinder: “In saying that I couldn't get used to Voight, it doesn't mean that I disapprove of Nichols' conception. Nichols' conception of Milo was different from mine. To say it's different is not saying that in a pejorative sense” (quoted in Kiley 355). Perhaps he did not want to inhibit ticket sales.

107. Heller, “On Translating Catch-22 into a Movie,” in Kiley, 356.

108. Ibid., 361-362.

109. Heller, “On Translating Catch-22 into a Movie,” in Kiley, 358.

110. Heller, “Foreword,” in Catch-22: A Dramatization (New York: Delacorte, 1973), xiii.

111. Ibid., xiv.

112. Ibid., xx.

113. Ibid.

114. Ibid., xi.

115. Heller, Catch-22: A Dramatization, 5.

116. Ibid.

117. Ibid.

118. Ibid., 175.

119. Ibid., 182.

120. Ibid., 214.

121. Ibid., 217.

122. Ibid.

123. Ibid.

124. Ibid., 218.

125. For more works that can be studied with Catch-22, see Eric Solomon's “From Christ in Flanders to Catch-22: An Approach to War Fiction” in Texas Studies in Literature and Language (1969): 851-66.

126. James H. Meredith, Understanding the Literature of World War II (Westport Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1999), 9.

127. Jaroslav Hasek, “Preface.” The Good Soldier Svejk. Trans. Cecil Parrott (London: Penguin Books, 1973), 1.

128. See J.P. Stern's article “War and the Comic Muse: The Good Soldier Schweik and Catch-22” for a lengthy discussion of the two novels.

Additional coverage of Heller's life and career is contained in the following sources published by the Gale Group: American Writers, Vol. 4; Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Vol. 24; Authors in the News, Vol. 1; Beacham's Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction: Biography and Resources, Vol. 2; Beacham's Guide to Literature for Young Adults, Vol. 1; Contemporary Authors, Vols. 5-8R, 187; Contemporary Authors Bibliographic Series, Vol. 1; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vols. 8, 42, 66; Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vols. 1, 3, 5, 8, 11, 36, 63; Contemporary Novelists, Ed. 7; Contemporary Popular Writers; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 2, 28, 227; Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook, 1980, 1999; DISCovering Authors; DISCovering Authors: British Edition; DISCovering Authors: Canadian Edition; DISCovering Authors Modules: Most-studied Authors, Novelists, and Popular Fiction; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Exploring Novels; Literature and Its Times, Vol. 4; Literature Resource Center; Major 20th-Century Writers, Eds. 1, 2; Novels for Students, Vol. 1; Reference Guide to American Literature, Ed. 4; St. James Guide to Young Adult Writers; Twayne's United States Authors; and World Literature Criticism.