Joseph Heller's Contradictory Faith In Religion In Catch-22

Joseph Heller's Catch-22, which was first published in 1961, is generally recognized as one of the most celebrated novels written by American contemporary writers. In fact, the appearance of the book not only gives 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 is a breakthrough to it. Heller manages to integrate humor and horror into a responsive chord with his unusual imagination and creativity. Ostensibly a"war novel", Catch-22 gives no detailed description of the war. Heller shows the readers the post-war American society in which the traditional values no longer govern and only absurdity is reasonable in point of his own view by using the imaginary Pianosa as the stage. The contents of the novel are series of absurd accidents that have taken place in the American Air Force during the World War II.Binary oppositions are regarded as the basis of Structuralism. In Todorov's eyes, characters can be seen as nouns, their attributes as adjectives and their actions, verbs. Then all the actions in the novel can be examined to explore the common elements and the pattern structuring them. In Catch-22, it is not difficult to find out some binary oppositions, such as, the officers vs. religion, Yossarian vs. religion, the chaplain vs. religion.The present thesis begins with Heller's life experience in an attempt to seek his religious belief, follows it up with detailed analysis of religious features in Catch-22 with a view to the brief history of religions, and ends with a conclusion: Heller's contradictory faith in religion is mainly displayed by the unsteady attitudes to religion of the characters, which reflect the common different attitudes to religion of the contemporary people after the WWII.