Yossarian In James Heller's Catch-22

Yossarian. Surely, such a name does not exist or cannot possibly even have a right to do so. What a name, even thinking of it!

Really, James Heller’s Catch 22’s hero or ante-hero is something that no one else could have dreamed of but a modernist and at that, a sadist, a righteously cynical one. In fact, during the rudimentary monologues of characters like Colonel Cathcart, Captain Black and Major Major that make the novel a swashbuckler, it all involves them questioning the almost dreamlike existence of man with a name like that. Yossarian: a character that the author did tribute to by writing Closing time, his 1992 reprisal to Catch-22, and did not fail to add in the latter book’s paperback introduction that his major creation will never die in his own hands but in another’s.

So much for James Heller. So much for us the readers who have to keep our ribs on hold tickled by many trials within the book, poignantly metaphysical, where a character asks ‘who is’ that stepping on his feet while a court martial is going on. That alone, if it does not give a hint of how boring, pettish and deviating

It being a material precondition that surely someone must have been stepped upon, it becomes nonsensical and even a little strange that no one will own it up. Why, because apart from the main trial, there are always so many other distractions in Catch-22, that can make the distraction count in favor or against the main trial going on. This parallels the many entreaties of various legal personnel in Kafka’s The Trial, who show just how K can amass more speed towards conviction or release by distracting the judge with personal liking of himself such as recommending himself to a friend of the judge, like the painter, Titorello, or his personal lawyer who knows a prominent director who in turn also has familiarity with the