Catch-22

Captain John Yossarian is a U.S. Army Air Forces bombardier stationed on the tiny Mediterranean island of Pianosa in the final year of World War II, and he has decided that everyone is trying to kill him. It doesn't matter that there's a war on; the enemy, as far as Yossarian is concerned, is anyone — friend or foe — who wants him to fly more missions. He would very much like to stop. The only way out is to be declared insane, but here he runs into the catch.

Catch-22 specifies that a concern for one's own safety in the face of real and immediate danger is the process of a rational mind. To be excused from flying missions, a man must be crazy; but any man who asks to be excused is obviously sane, and so must keep flying. It is, Yossarian realizes, a perfect trap, and it is everywhere.

Joseph Heller's savage, hilarious, and structurally daring novel spirals through a huge cast of grotesques — the war-profiteering mess officer Milo Minderbinder, the glory-hungry Colonel Cathcart who keeps raising the number of required missions, the bewildered chaplain — in a looping, non-chronological assault on the logic of war and bureaucracy. Beneath the farce runs real horror, and Catch-22 has become one of the defining anti-war novels of the twentieth century, its title now a byword for any absurd, no-win situation.