Introduction

Abstract

One year after the publication of Catch-22 Joseph Heller made the following statement in the course of an interview: ‘There’s more cant and more hypocrisy and more hollow rationalization being directed at humanity than ever before … so that Americans can still talk of this as the land of liberty, the land of freedom and democracy, while at the same time they are trying to cope with many widespread problems arising from the exhaustion of opportunities and the severely limited freedom of each other …’.¹ Into this gap between public rhetoric and national reality Heller brought his comic methods to bear, methods which thrive on disparity and incongruity. James Nagel, the leading Heller critic, related the humour of Heller’s first novel to the tradition of Juvenalian satire which mounts an ‘attack on the basic principles and fundamental order of society’.² The notion of attack is pointedly relevant not only to Catch-22 but to each of Heller’s subsequent works where the projected images of patriotic obedience, professional and domestic success, political achievement, and pious submission become the targets of those works’ ironies. As in the early works of Bruce Jay Friedman, Philip Roth, and other novelists loosely referred to as black humorists, Heller has regularly constructed adversarial fictions which are deploying caricature, parody and other tactics against the public values of contemporary American life.