On The Art Of Temporal Arrangement Of Events In Joseph Heller's Catch-22

Catch-22 is the first novel written by the contemporary American writer, Joseph Heller, the initiator of American Black Humor. Through depiction of the crazy world of an American Air Force base on the island Pianosa off the Italian coast during World War II, the novel reflects the depth of the absurdity of modern American society. Being the representative work of American Black Humor, Catch-22 attracts many people to explore in the world created by Joseph Heller and study its peculiar content and technique of writing.In this thesis, the art of temporal arrangement of events in the novel is anatomized and investigated in respect to temporal order, temporal frequency and temporal duration. Besides the usually adopted qualitative analysis in the study of literary works, quantitative analysis is innovatively introduced here, with the purpose of achieving more scientific, precise and convincing results of the study of the novel. By exploring and illustrating the features of these three temporal factors and their respective tendencies with the progress of chapters in the novel, the functions of the temporal manipulation of events is demonstrated, the co-relationship and co-ordination of these factors are discussed, and the accomplishment of the temporal factors in serving the theme of the novel is analyzed.