Catch-22 541altar, a parody of a church gathering. For Brown the
experience in the woods has a pernicious influence
on his own spiritual development; after that night,
his faith in religion and in other people, including his
wife, is destroyed. Concluding that the world is evil,
Brown goes to his grave a bitter old man.
Personal choice in matters of faith seems an
important issue in the story, with the individual
urged to follow his conscience even if it means
standing in opposition to his community. Brown
has a choice of whether or not to enter the forest
and take part in the ritual. At the dark altar, when
he thinks he sees the shade of his mother urging
him to resist evil, he cries out to his wife. At that
moment, the scene vanishes and Brown is left to
wonder whether he only dreamed it.
However, following his conscience and making
the “right” decision doesn’t guarantee Brown a happy
life; rather, the experience causes him to lose faith
in humanity. Saved from one evil, he is, as a con-
sequence, poisoned to life and human society. The
story hints at the insufficiency of moral religious life,
either as a means to root evil out of the human heart,
or as a comfort to the righteous individual who turns
away from corrupt human society.
In “Young Goodman Brown,” issues of religion
and faith touch all aspects of a person’s life, as an
individual, in the family, and as a member of society.
In this story religion is trailed by its shadow, the sin-
ister secret desires of the heart. As in Hawthorne’s
famous novel The Scarlet Letter, which is also set in
Puritan New England, the quest for meaning in life
is woven into issues of religion and faith, with the
individual faced with the difficult decision of stand-
ing alone against his community.
Mary Goodwin
HELLER, JOSEPH Catch-22 (1961)
Catch-22 is a brilliant satire of the military that
illustrates the darkly humorous side of the insanity
that is warfare. No organization or institution is safe
from the ire of Heller’s pen. He sends up the mili-
tary bureaucracy, free-market enterprise, organized
religion, and social class.
Catch-22 is the story of John Yossarian and
his quest to survive World War II. He has only
one problem: Catch-22. Catch-22 is the military
bureaucratic rule that states that any soldier must be
removed from combat duty if he is deemed insane;
however, removing oneself from an endless con-
tinuation of suicidal missions is an act that proves a
soldier is sane enough to continue to fly and fight.
This institutional catch traps Yossarian on the island
of Pianosa in perpetual danger, as the war rages on
and thousands of people whom he has never met are
trying to kill him.
Catch-22 is a landmark of American fiction, one
of the rare works of literature that defined a century
and introduced a new term into the lexicon of the
English language. Heller’s masterful and humorous
condemnation of warfare continues to entertain,
inspire, and educate readers from the high school
senior to the retiree.
Heller’s comedic portrayal of men seeking only
to survive and those who seek only to profit from the
iniquities of humanity destroys the fallacy that war
is romantic and for all time defines survival as the
one true heroic act of war.
Drew McLaughlinHeroism in Catch-22
Catch-22 is a story of heroes and cowards. The island
of Pianosa, the fictional setting of the novel, is popu-
lated by a motley crew of cowardly heroes and heroic
cowards. Such is the maddening, paradoxical world
of Catch-22.
John Yossarian is an unlikely protagonist, a bom-
bardier by trade, a coward by nature. He is heroic
through his cowardice. Yossarian is driven by one
thing: survival. He is described as having given
up his soldierly mission in favor of saving himself.
“Yossarian was a lead bombardier who had been
demoted because he no longer gave a damn whether
he missed or not. He had decided to live forever or
die in the attempt, and his only mission each time
he went up was to come down alive” (29). Yossarian
lies and schemes his way out of combat duty and
into the hospital, always searching and exhausting
every opportunity to escape the clutches of Catch-- He thinks,
There was only one catch and that was
Catch-22, which specified that a concern for