A Study Of Yossarian In Catch-22 From Jungian Archetype Theory

Joseph Heller, an American Writer, wrote Catch-22 which was a classic novel of satire in 1961. According to statistics, this novel had been sold over twenty-five million volumes in 1988 and it ranked the seventh place among Modern Library 100 Best Novels in the 20 th century. In the minds of many Americans, Catch-22 can be comparable to Bible and many American colleges regard Catch-22 as one of the required books. The plot of the novel, at the end of World War II, a US Air Force Base lies in the south of the Italian island named “Pianosa”of Elba in the Mediterranean Sea. Although Yossarian seems to be a helpless bird in the absurdity and chaos, he ignores the authority of the army and he finally escapes the wars and sneaks off to Sweden for surviving. Based on the clue of Yossarian’s life experience, Heller alludes to post-war society’s chaotic system and exposes man’s helpless fates through absurd forms.This thesis interprets the protagonist, Yossarian’s anti-hero image in Catch-22 from Jungian archetype theory, including persona, anima, shadow and self. Additionally, the thesis probes Yossarian’s psychological factors of his changing personality and analyzes the important process how Yossarian changes from self-contraction to self-realization.This thesis mainly adopts archetype criticism, literature review, contrastive analysis and textual close interpretation methods. In the first place, this thesis highlights Yossarian’s self-contradiction and makes readers have a preliminary understanding of Yossarian’s character and inner world by analyzing the difference between Colonel Cathcart, Milo and Yossarian in persona and the difference between Nately and Yossarian in anima. What’s more, the thesis strengthens the change of Yossarian’s character through describing the shadow of Snowden’s death on Yossarian. Finally, from the most central part, self in archetype theory, the thesis highlights Yossarian’s anti-hero image and deepens the theme of Catch-22 by interpreting Yossarian’s awakening, self-realization and his anti-hero image.By contrastive analysis of the characters in Catch-22, this thesis not only stresses Yossarian’s anti-hero image, but also reveals Joseph Heller’s critique and irony of American society. What’s more, from Yossarian’s important process from contradiction, confusion and psychological changes to final self-realization, we can know that it’s very important for us to make different choices when facing different environments.