In Search Of "Authentic Self"

This paper is meant to talk about the existentialism in Joseph Heller's masterpiece Catch-22. As regards to the influence of existentialism on literature, Jean Paul Sartre's theories are the one of the outstanding significance, which is the main concern in this thesis.Existentialism is a European philosophic movement with various schools or attitudes of different eras, including the Christian concepts of Kierkegaard and Maritain, and theories of Sartre and Camus which have affected American literature primarily in terms of atheism. Holding that there are no accepted bases to explain the mysteries of human existence and that the individual must develop his being free of society, existentialism contends that solitariness makes the right condition for freedom of choice. However, it also brings anguish to the individual as he recognizes the futility of attempting to treat the paradoxes of a meaningless universe and an absurd world and to achieve self-mastery in an atmosphere of entire freedom.Such views and such a sense of metaphysical isolation in the consideration of the individual in the present moment are found in the fiction of Saul Bellow, Paul Bowles, Ralph Ellison, William Styron, Richard Wright etc. Frequently using the monologue to show the protagonist's growing consciousness of the human condition, since thought rather than action is dominant in existential fiction, their novels deal with depersonalization, alienation from society and belief in divinity, and an individual search for identity.~1Joseph Heller (1923-1999) is one of the most representative writers of Black Humor, which forecasts the dominating of American post-modernism literature. The core of Black Humor is the description of the absurdity of the world, which is also a doctrine of existentialism. So it is said that existentialism is one of the origins of Black Humor. This paper means to recover the existential elements in Catch-22, with the bridge of Black Humor.