200
PARTISAN REVIEW
wanted him dead"), to all the insane and fanatical people in his own
army ("they wanted to kill him, too"), to all the organs of his body,
with their arsenal of fatal diseases :
There were diseases of the skin, diseases of the bone, diseases of
the lung, diseases of the stomach, diseases of the heart, blood
and arteries. There were diseases of the head , diseases of the
neck , diseases of the chest, diseases of the intestines, diseases of
the crotch . There were even diseases of the feet . There were bil–
lions of conscientious body cells oxidating away day and night
like dumb animals at their complicated job of keeping him alive
and healthy , and everyone was a potential traitor and foe . There
were so many diseases that it took a truly diseased mind to even
think about them as often as he and HungryJoe did .
Yossarian seems perilously close to the Sterling Hayden character in
Dr. Strange/ave ,
the general who fears that women are sapping his
vital bodily fluids. The insanity of the system, in this case the army,
breeds a defensive counter-insanity, a mentality of organized survival
that mirrors the whole system of rationalized human waste and de–
valuation. The self itself becomes an army, a totalitarian body politic,
demanding total vigilance against the threat of betrayal and insurrec–
tion . Each individual organ, each cell , becomes an object of paranoid
anxiety.
The pattern of
Catch-22
is similar to that of
Mother Night:
a
world gone mad, a protagonist caught up in the madness, who even–
tually steps outside it in a slightly mad way. The Sweden to which
Yossarian flees at the end of the book is something of a pipe dream,
a pure elsewhere . Yossarian's friend Orr has made it there-from the
Mediterranean in a rowboat!-but Orr is Yossarian's opposite, utterly
at home in the world, as idiotically free of anxiety as Yossarian is
dominated by it. Orr is the unkillable imp, the irrepressible innocent,
a "likable dwarf with a smutty mind and a thousand valuable skills
that would keep him in a low income group all his life ." Orr is
the gentile Crusoe to Yossarian's Jewish neurotic; along with the
diabolical Milo they form a spectrum of the possibilities of survival in
extreme situations, which includes not only wartime but just about
all of modern life, indeed the whole human condition , for which the
war is ultimately a metaphor. But Yossarian goes through a second
