MORRIS DICKSTEIN
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plot, his distaste for violence and heroic posturing, and his affinity
for a few simple human verities help make his work the moral equiva–
lent of the New Politics of the early sixties, which substituted com–
munitarian good will, anarchic individualism and ethical fervor for
the old staples of ideology. But at his best the ingenious reversals of
Vonnegut's plots go well beyond the simple verities of his own
moralizing, provide indeed as full a helping of moral ambiguity as
any modernist could want.
I said earlier that characters in black humor novels tend to be
cartoonlike and two-dimensional, without the capacity to grow or
change. To this we must add the qualification that the protagonist
is usually different: he doesn't completely belong to this mode of
reality or system of representation . As Richard Poirier has suggested
apropos ofPynchon, the central character of these novels moves often
on a different plane: he shows at least the capacity to become a fuller,
more sentient human being, a character in a realistic novel. In the
first part of the book the' 'hero" is typically enmeshed in a system of
comic repetition: tics of speech and behavior, entanglements of plot,
all the "routines" of verbal black humor, life imitating vaudeville.
Heller, for example, like Dickens, knows how to make his own comic
technique approximate poignant human realities. And, as the com–
edy in
Catch-22
darkens, the system of dehumanization becomes
clearer, and the central character becomes increasingly isolated in his
impulse to challenge and step outside it.
In Yossarian, Heller introduces a new figure into postwar Amer–
ican fiction, descended from the schlemiel of the Jewish novel but
finally an inversion of that passive and unhappy figure . Heller tells
us he's an Assyrian, but only because (as he said to an interviewer)
"I wanted to get an extinct culture ... My purpose in doing so was
to get an outsider, a man who was intrinsically an outsider." The
typi.cal schlemiel is certainly no hero, but like Yossarian has a real
instinct for survival. In earlier days Yossarian had really tried to bomb
the targets, as he was supposed to do. Now his only goal is to avoid
flak, to keep alive. "Yossarian was the best man in the group at
evasive action." This Yossarian is concerned only with saving his skin,
obsessed by the things that threaten his life. "There were too many
dangers for Yossarian to keep track of." And Heller gives us a won–
derful catalogue of them, from Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo ("they all
