The Plays and Other Writings of the 1960s

Abstract

At the end of Chapter 13 of Catch-22 Yossarian reaches an agreement with Colonels Cathcart and Korn that his ‘punishment’ for going over the bridge at Ferrara twice during a bombing mission should be to receive a medal. Korn ushers him out of the office commenting ‘exit smiling’. It is only a passing joke but the phrase indicates a characteristic of the novel: that its scenes are often organised like those in a play. This is no mere detail because Heller has admitted in several interviews that his original ambition was to become a playwright. At high school he wanted to write farces like those of Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman.¹ Hart and Kaufman collaborated in a series of works from 1934 to 1940 which would have been produced in New York during Heller’s teens. It is possible that he developed a feel for tempo and understood their skill at playing off characters’ obsessive purposes against each other. Hart and Kaufman also convert potentially serious themes (marriage as a means of escape from one’s class, fulfillment of ambition in Hollywood, etc.) into comedy. Heller follows similar strategies in Catch-22, creating absurd effects through the entrances and exits via Major Major’s window, setting up a narrative tempo from scene to scene which maximises the ludicrous impact of individual scenes, and masking the ultimate seriousness of the novel’s subject (what could be more serious than death?) by jokes and burlesque.