An Interpretation Of Catch-22from The Perspective Of Existentialism

Contemporary American writer Heller’s masterpiece, Catch-22is the classical work of black humor. Its creation is not only relevant to the story, knowledge and experience of the author, but also is closely related to the "crazy" and "absurd" American social environment. The philosophical foundation of the novel in black humor is existentialism which is also a key to interpret Catch-22. The novel wins the appreciation of the readers all around the world using both the philosophical mind of existentialism and his artistic skill. Through the absurdity in the army, human’s alienation in this environment and the lack of the religious belief, finally the hero Yossarian get his freedom through his freely choice and maintain the dignity and value of human beings these several aspects elaborated the existential features which embodies from the novel. In the novel, Heller describes a series of the absurd events that occurred in the U.S. flight brigade during world War Two. It shows before the reader a world of chaotic, irrational and absurdity. This thesis is divided into three parts:the introduction, body (of three chapters) and conclusion.Introduction briefly introduced Heller’s life experience and the writing background of the novel, the main contents of Sartre’s existentialism, the research state of his works in literary world and the significance of research in this paper.The first chapter discusses the absurdity of the world from the angle of structure. It contains three aspects:the absurdity of the structure, character and language. The novel reflects the absurd, chaos and hypocrisy world separately from different levels which makes the authors adopt such an absurd writing style to organize work, and he use Yossarian and Orr as examples to illustrate the absurdity of the world.The second chapter discusses the alienation of human beings and the real world. The existentialists representing by Sartre puts alienation as its theoretical basis. In the story, the officer, soldiers, and people in the small island and Rome are all been alienated.The third chapter analysis another part of the existentialism-nihility. The former part describes the collapse of religious and life belief and the latter part writes the consequences lead by the former part taking Snowden’s death and the White Soldier as examples. Because of facing the indifference and the absurd of the world, countless times failure in searching of freedom, they are always in the shadow of death. They are always in a kind of pessimism which contains trouble, loneliness and fear. All of these reflect the deep sense of futility. In Heller’s works,"destiny" is the enemy with people who couldn’t do anything.Conclusion focused on the free choice to meet the challenge of life Heller advocates of "butch" spirit. In the novel, at first the world is fantastic, people were alienated and lack faith, but in the final analysis, the people have the right to choose freely, Yossarian at last choose to escape. People maintain the dignity and courage and realize the self-worth in the face of the evil and powerful forces. This is consists to the Sartre’s theory which tells the significance of human survival in the free choice.