Questing The Meaning Of Love In A Wasteland

Joseph Heller (1923-1999), a modern American writer, gains world fame with Black Humor. His anti-war novel Catch-22 has been taken as a significant work in modern literature. In order to express the dissatisfaction with the reality, the novel juxtaposes absurdity with seriousness, reality with exaggeration, comedy with tragedy with a tone of satire and cynicism, which makes the reader laugh in tears and ponder in heartquake. Heller's second novel Something Happened (1974) is the sequential of Catch-22.In Something Happened, he further explores the problems of modern America in theme and develops its writing technique from Catch-22. The novel portrays absurd American society in the eyes of a corporation man Bob Slocum. Heller intends to depict the life of Yossarian after World War II in his second novel, revealing that, under the bureaucratic administration, he gets the willies in peace time as he does in war time.Chapter I of this dissertation introduces Heller's writing career and the social background of Something Happened, makes a comparison between Catch-22 and Something Happened, and explains the motivation of this dissertation. The publication of Something Happened did not attract readers the way Catch-22 had done, and most critics focused on Slocum's character and Heller's language. This dissertation will start from the problems and predicament of Slocum, and try to find an answer in the social system.Chapter II and III explore the theme of the novel, which focus on Slocum's personality and the cause of his split personality. In Chapter II, Slocum speaks of his split personality in the long-winded confession: on the one hand, he tries to shatter off the bondage of social convention; on the other hand, he conforms to the potential rule of the society. So he has doubt about his identity all the time. According to Sartre, a free man has to take social responsibility, otherwise no matter what he does—whether he behaves as a weapon for aggressive self-assertion, or hides behind norms and reason, he will live in bad faith and lose self-identity. Therefore the morbid action of Slocum,...