Catch 22

War Novel week, apparently. I read Catch-22 this summer, so it's a little fuzzy in my mind. But all I can say, is that it was absurd as all get out and I absolutely loved it. It was like reading M*A*S*H and Hogan's Heroes and a russian novel all at once. One of my bosses walked by and said that it really made war make sense, didn't it? And the odd thing is, that it does. The absurdity and the pointlessness is clear, all at once. It is a story that shows not tells. It is All Quiet on the Western Front with a wallop of humor. All Quiet has just a dry straight man humor while Catch-22 is like Comedy Central. To counter the humor, the actual war scenes are steeped with a crippling fear. The style is jocular and in soldier's language. The kind of language that accompanies whores in Rome and drunk young men escaping camp. It's coarse and apropos. All of the men are obsessed with avoiding active duty and the upper ranks are obsessed with keeping them there. In the end, among the wreckage of Rome, the main character becomes obsessed with finding Nateley's Whore's Kid sister. Not really a character, but a drive towards something...hope. Something real. A purpose. Hope dies when the most absurd and fun character, the really driving factor in the main character's life deserts and disappears, presumed dead. Hope is resurrected at the end when the protagonist finds out that the character never died, he escaped with careful planning. Seeing the true soul of the protagonist is a must in a war novel. Being able to glimpse the soul of another character changes almost everything.

I'm sorry I cannot say more. But you should read it.

Beowulf

Things Fall Apart

A Death in the Family

Pride and Prejudice

Go Tell It on the Mountain

Waiting for Godot

The Adventures of Augie March

Jane Eyre

Wuthering Heights

The Stranger

Death Comes for the Archbishop

The Canterbury Tales

The Cherry Orchard

The Awakening

Heart of Darkness

The Last of the Mohicans

The Red Badge of Courage

Inferno

Don Quixote

Robinson Crusoe

A Tale of Two Cities

Crime and Punishment

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

An American Tragedy

The Three Musketeers

The Mill on the Floss

Invisible Man

Selected Essays

As I Lay Dying

The Sound and the Fury

Tom Jones

The Great Gatsby

Madame Bovary

The Good Soldier

Faust

Lord of the Flies

Tess of the d'Urbervilles

The Scarlet Letter

Catch 22

A Farewell to Arms

The Iliad

The Odyssey

The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Their Eyes Were Watching God

Brave New World

A Doll's House

The Portrait of a Lady

The Turn of the Screw

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

The Metamorphosis

The Woman Warrior

To Kill a Mockingbird

Babbitt

The Call of the Wild

The Magic Mountain

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Bartleby the Scrivener

Moby Dick

The Crucible

Beloved

A Good Man is Hard to Find

Long Day's Journey into Night

Animal Farm

Doctor Zhivago

The Bell Jar

Selected Tales

Swann's Way

The Crying of Lot 49

All Quiet on the Western Front

Call It Sleep

The Catcher in the Rye

Hamlet

Macbeth

A Midsummer Night's Dream

Romeo and Juliet

Pygmalion

Frankenstein

Ceremony

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Antigone

Oedipus Rex

The Grapes of Wrath

Treasure Island

Uncle Tom's Cabin

Gulliver's Travels

Vanity Fair

Walden

War and Peace

Fathers and Sons

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Candide

Slaughterhouse-Five

The Color Purple

The House of Mirth

Collected Stories(Welty)

Leaves of Grass

The Picture of Dorian Gray

The Glass Menagerie

To the Lighthouse

Native Son

All Quiet on the Western Front

War novel for the win. I thought I'd hate war novels. And war is bad. But these writers see into the truth. Erich Maria Remarque (who is not in fact a girl - Germans are odd) has a wonderful style that speaks plainly, though not unbeautifully, from the point of view of a German soldier during WWI. It is the style that drew me into Les Miserables as well. Perhaps it is the slight stilt translation gives any novel, but the plainness is apropos and starkly highlights the bleak, trench-sunken front. One moment, a simple smoke will captivate the scene and suddenly, the most beautiful prose is dedicated to the dying of horses. The transition isn't even noted, it seems so natural to speak so passionately of war.

Death is the first sign of war. Remarque tosses it off casually, the way war does. In the first several pages, a childhood friend dies. In a hollywood movie, this would have been the climax. The tears would have followed. But in the novel, after consolation in the form of joking reassurances, the childhood friend died and a fellow soldier took his boots. It's life. Remarque showed the brutality and coldness of war in the first few pages to break the reader to the reality. And many people died. That doesn't exactly follow that insensitivity ruled all. Though one by one the narrator's friends died, the last one to go was saved by the narrator and crushed in his arms after carrying him on a broken leg before someone pointed out that he was already dead. Loyalty existed, hidden under death. Remarque shows theme through actions, pointedly placed throughout the story.

Remarque is also a huge fan of repetition. How many times was an account of war, death, camaraderie, smoking, girls, and alcohol followed up by a reminder that every soldier was only 19 or 20 years old? The narrator himself was only 19, recruited by the schoolmaster in his village. 19. 19. So young. I suppose I'm only 19.

Though much is a patchwork of experiences, purposefully blurred to give the impression of sameness, oneness, and meaningless repetition, two scenes stand out.

The first is an example of the dryness in the face of war, especially among the comrades. All the men are standing around talking and smoking, and discussing war. Why? Why are they forced to fight and die? One man plays dumb while one tries to overexplain and jokingly shows the absurdity of war.

The second is a scene with the narrator and a French soldier trapped in a pit together. Out of self defense, the narrator stabs him and has to spend a night and a day with a dying soldier that he killed. He tries everything to fix the man. He swears to find the man's family and apologize, though he knows he'll never follow through. He finds that when it's hand to hand combat, killing is different. And war is cowardly in that way.

Please read it.

I almost cried at the end.