A Dramatic Catch

A character’s situation and his understanding of it creates allusion without disrupting the story. Joseph Heller’s Catcht-22 uses dramatic irony to redefine the idea of absurdity as a whole. The author’s repetitive use of irrational situations paints the idea that anything can happen and that it is only those who understand this that may remain sane.

The novel’s characters are used as a sample of individuals with different levels of understanding on illogicality to demonstrate the effects of expecting random events versus assuming certain ones.  The squadron’s required mission count serves as a great example, “I’m all packed now and I am waiting to go home, I’ve finished my sixty missions.’ ‘So what?’ Yossarian replied. ‘He’s only going to raise them again.’ ‘Maybe this time he won’t’” (307). Dobbs, the first to speak, is cheerful for he expects what would be normal: for him to go home. Yossarian, who is clearly more experienced, knows this to be false and hopes to prevent Dobb’s misery when they inevitably raise the mission count. What is important to note is the mood in which these characters find themselves. Dobbs is ignorant and cheerful while Yossarian is knowledgeable and therefore depressed. The author wishes to contrast them to emphasize the influence knowledge has on mood. Even though Yossarian’s and Dobb’s fate may be the same, their perception over it determines their current existence as being great or terrible. Heller’s character development serves him to develop absurdity as subjective idea. His characters have widely different expectations and the results can be both amusing and usual.

Heller’s dramatic irony takes on more complex idea of absurdity through paradoxical events in the novel. Once the idea of subjective absurdity is understood by the reader, Heller introduces the concept of ‘circular’ absurdity with paradoxes. These paradoxes are self-conflicting, they seam impossible. How can you visit Major Major if he doesn’t allow anyone to see him when he is in his office and it is only when he leaves that people are allowed to enter? Much like the chaplain anyone who confronts such a set of ruled is startled, but unlike characters readers are able to identify it as a paradox. There really is no way a visitor can see Major² without him making an exception to his rules. Heller paints the idea that there is something of an impenetrable fortress. Is absurdity such a fortress? One that cannot be accessed unless given exclusive permission? Which leads to question what the exception of the Chaplain towards the Major’s rules means. Absurdity is a fortress of such; it holds only invisible doors that can be only be accessed through exceptions made by others.

Absurdity becomes part of a dramatic irony. Any beholder becomes a character unaware of the situation he finds himself in and it is up to an external force to pull him from it. People must transform from character to reader in a sense of perspective viewing the situation from a much wider view. Once a subject understands absurdity they become sane: aware of their surroundings and in a way depressed.