On Catch-22 And Its Chinese Version

Heller's first novel Catch-22 is now widely recognized as one of the most important books written by an American since World War II. It is also regarded as a masterpiece of Black Humor and a classical modernism work. In fact the appearance of the book not only gave a new thrust to Modernism which seemed to fade away at that time with demise or retirement of a group of Modernist giants, but also was a breakthrough to it. And in this new modernism genre, Heller managed to integrate humor and horror into a responsive chord with his unusual imagination and creativity.Catch-22 is now still popular in the United States and Great Britain. But in China, due to the vast cultural differences, the sophisticated text, readers' limited understanding of Black Humor, and the unsatisfactory Chinese version, the novel receives not so much enthusiastic response from Chinese readers and scholars as it does in the United States and Great Britain. And this thesis is to make a comprehensive research on the novel's text, background, themes and the translation of the book to reach the following goals:(1) To help readers arrive at a complete understanding of the book and Heller's achievements with the help of this systematic survey on the novel's text, background and themes;(2) To help readers get some sense of what Black Humor is through careful examinations on this typical Black Humor work;(3) To help produce a better Chinese version with the help of this evaluation on the current Chinese version.And the thesis consists of eight chapters: Chapter 1 is an introduction; Chapter 2 is a general summary of Catch-22; in Chapter 3, the genre of the novel is fully highlighted; in Chapter 4, the probe into the structure of the book is pursued; Chapter 5 is about the style of the book; in Chapter 6, the post-war American social context is fully depicted and the research on the themes of Heller's book is carried out; Chapter 7 discusses how the book should be translated; in Chapter 8, a conclusion is drawn.But there is no general agreement on Catch-22 because it is complex in the genre, the structure, the style, the social background and the theme. This research is made on these issues to shed some new light on this novel and to attract more readers' and scholars' attention to it. On the other hand, being lack of a comprehensive understanding of the book, the translators of the current Chinese version fail to convey the distinct features of the book to Chinese readers faithfully and smoothly. So this comprehensive research on the novel and the detailed evaluation on the current Chinese version are likely to help produce a better Chinese version.