Novel Summaries Analysis

If The Catcher in the Rye merely detailed the awkwardness of a young adult growing up, it would still be valuable. But Holden’s periodic allusions to his favorite authors and books, his often humorous and consciously unsophisticated analyses of those books and writers, and the novel’s carefully ironic imitation of several powerful literary traditions help explain why Salinger’s book is also a major work of American literature, closely studied by scholars and critics.

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The Catcher in the Rye has been charged with three major failings: excessive and unrealistic use of foul language; its obsession with a character whose anxiety and alienation are not objectively valid; and social criticism so unrelenting, so evident of distaste for the modern world, that it borders on misanthropy, the hatred of humankind itself.

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1. Holden constantly uses the word “phony” to describe people, events, and popular culture such as movies. What does he mean by this word and what does it indicate about his values?

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1. Compare and Contrast Holden and Huckleberry Finn. How does their adolescent inexperience permit their creators, Salinger and Mark Twain, to assert moral values?

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Salinger’s other important books, all of which were published after The Catcher in the Rye, deal with a more extensive family than Holden’s: the Glass family. But these works can all be viewed as more sophisticated, philosophical explorations of the concerns and Themes first raised in The Catcher in the Rye. In Nine Stories, Salinger introduces the Glass family and suggests the profound spiritual disillusionment of Western artists that resulted from the Great Depression and World War II. Franny and Zooey describes the youngest members of this family and reiterates Salinger’s sharp criticism of contemporary society, pseudo-intellectuals, and the East Coast academic and literary culture. The character of Franny dramatizes a theme Salinger spent most of the 1950s exploring: the conflict between alienation from a world the European existentialist philosophers described as meaningless and without religious certitude, and a neo-mystical, religious psychology that Franny exhibits in her desire to escape that world. Salinger suggests that mysticism and a search for perfection, which Franny absorbs from her brilliant but suicidal older brother Seymour, is an insufficient solution to the condition of modern humankind. Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction portray Seymour as a visionary seer and seeker after Eastern religious insight who is so wounded by the world and frustrated by his inability to find perfect consciousness in its squalid reality that he cannot find peace. Salinger’s later fiction, scholars persuasively argue, is deeply philosophical and central to expressing the spiritual and psychological anxiety of artists and intellectuals in the post-World War II decades.

Joseph Heller was born on May 1, 1923, in New York City, and grew up near the Coney Island amusement park. His parents, recent Russian immigrants, spoke little English, and his father died when Joseph was only five years old. After graduating from high school, Heller joined the Army Air Corps in 1942, and flew sixty bombing missions in a B-25 before being discharged in 1945. Heller entered college after the war, earning a bachelor’s degree from New York University followed by a master’s degree from Columbia University, and studied for a year at Oxford on a Fulbright scholarship. He returned from England in 1950 and taught English at Pennsylvania State University but left to work in magazine advertising because he felt uncomfortable in the academic world.

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Catch-22 is a product of intense private and public concerns. Heller based the novel’s plot on his memories of World War II bombing missions; he derived its ironic tone and thematic substance from such sources as his father’s early death, the grotesque Coney Island neighborhood of his youth, the fast-paced, disjointed world of advertising, and his anxiety over the Korean War and Cold War tensions with China and Russia. Heller translated the intergroup antagonism that prevailed in the United States after the Second World War-the Communist witch hunts led by Senator Joseph McCarthy and the racial hatred that surfaced when southern schools began to be integrated-into the conflict between the common soldiers and the officers of Catch-22.

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The novel’s Setting is the mythical island of Pianosa, modeled closely on Corsica and located off the coast of Rome, eight miles south of Elba. The year is 1944, and as World War II draws to a close, the Allies continue to conduct round-the-clock bombing missions to Europe from their Air Force base on the island. Nearby Rome serves as the playground for off-duty aviators. The site of social madness in the form of brothels, debauchery, and senseless pain and murder, the city is symbolically the Rome of ancient times, just before the fall of the Roman Empire.

The protagonist of Catch-22, Captain John Yossarian, is motivated by two closely related impulses: to subvert the repressive military establishment and to survive. His desperate attempts to escape death and to preserve a meaningful code of morality reflect the ongoing human struggle against overwhelming and frequently life-threatening forces or institutions. Paranoid that an unidentified “they” are trying to kill him, Yossarian feigns insanity, seeks refuge in the hospital, poisons his squadron with soap powder, and moves a bomb line on a map. When he does fly combat missions, “Yo-Yo” traces irregular patterns in the sky, evading flak right and left. Although labeled crazy by many of the other Characters, Yossarian is sane in believing his life endangered-whether by officers such as Cathcart who care less about their men’s safety than about possible promotions, by Milo Minderbinder and his twisted entrepreneurial schemes, or by Nately’s knife-wielding prostitute.

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Catch-22 both absorbs and parodies a variety of literary genres. Given the book’s fragmented chronology, episodic structure, and caricatured characterizations, some critics have objected to labeling it a novel. The book’s mockery of political and social institutions and comic exaggeration are characteristic of the satire; Yossarian’s series of misadventures echo the picaresque tradition, and the work’s huge cast of Characters and descent-into-the-underworld motif bring to mind the epic.

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