After the war then there was the tendency to view man as isolated and the universe as possessing no inherent truth, value or meaning. It was believed that man was able to show heroism and dignity even in defeat. Before the war it was commonly thought that man was a fairly rational creature who lives in an at least partly intelligible universe. The Literature of the Absurd has its roots in the Theatre of the Absurd and the absurdist movement that emerged after World War II as a rebellion against traditional values and literature.
To come to a valid conclusion I will then analyze the significance of absurdity in Catch-22.
Further I will examine the failure of communication and the novel’s structure. I will analyze the novel’s absurdist vision by looking at the absurdity of war, the absurdity of bureaucracy, absurdity of capitalism and at the famous catch-22. To support my thesis I will examine definitions and features of the Theatre of the Absurd and of the Literature of the Absurd and compare them to Catch-22. Yet the novel’s absurd vision differs radically from other literature of the absurd because instead of accepting the universe as absurd, Heller protests against the absurdity he describes. In the course of this paper I will show that Catch-22 belongs to the Literature of the Absurd, that Heller writes in the tradition of the absurd and that he uses absurdist techniques to describe his novel’s absurd and disjointed world. The topic of this research paper is the absurd in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.
Running to Responsibility: Absurdity in Joseph Heller’s ‘Catch-22’
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