Bureaucracy: absurd

The bureaucracy of Catch-22 is absurdly illogical. While telling the story of a WWII Air Force bombardier named Yossarian, Joseph Heller writes of many characters and scenes which just don’t make sense.

To start out, Catch-22 slowly becomes an umbrella term for rules that seem more like paradoxes than common sense. Catch-22 is used mostly as a kind of self fulfilling prophecy. For example, the original Catch-22 states that any pilot can be grounded from combat if they are declared insane, but anyone who asks to be grounded is declared sane because you’d have to be crazy to want to keep flying, and thus they are sent back up into the air. The bureaucrats of the military have no regard for the pilots lives, and even when the war in Europe is practically over, they are still forced to go up into the air.

I think my favorite example of bureaucracy in Catch-22 is the censoring of letters being sent back home. In the beginning of the novel Yossarian is in the hospital to run away from duty, but while acting sick he still has to read through all personal letters to make sure no military information gets out. He quickly starts making up his own games and did things like censoring everything but punctuation. When he did this he signed all of them as Irving Washington, and eventually Washington Irving to change it up. Major Major does this too later in the book. He would get loads of letters to sign everyday that would get caught in loops of just signing and sending it back. He found out that if he signed Washington Irving, they didn’t come back.