MORRIS DICKSTEIN
201
change before the book ends: he becomes a troublemaker, and worse
still, the unwilling keeper of the book 's conscience , just as Nately's
whore becomes the figure of Nemesis , the haunting , surreal spirit of
female
r~venge
for the callous inhumanity of a man-made world .
The earlier Yossarian saw through the no-win bind of Catch-22 and
set out monomaniacally to survive. But as each of the others goes
separately, uncomplainingly,
to
his predictable fate , Yossarian be–
comes more and more the sombre registrar of their deaths and exits :
Nately's whore was on his mind , as were Kraft and Orr and
Nately and Dunbar, and Kid Sampson and McWatt, and all the
poor and stupid and diseased people he had seen in Italy, Egypt
and North Africa and knew about in other areas of the world ,
and Snowden and Nately's whore 's kid sister were on his con–
science, too .
Yossarian has come willy-nilly to brood about more than his own
inner organs . Other people have become a desperate reality
to
him,
and with it a sense of their common fate, their mutual essence. The
secret of Snowden, who spills his guts in the tail of a plane, is re–
vealed to Yossarian alone :
His teeth were chattering in horror. He forced himself to look
again. Here was God 's plenty, all right , he thought bitterly as
he stared-liver, lungs , kidneys , ribs, stomach and bits of the
stewed tomatoes Snowden had eaten that day for lunch. Yossarian
hated stewed tomatoes... . He wondered how in the world to
begin to save him.
''I'm cold ," Snowden whispered. ' 'I'm cold."
"There, there," Yossarian mumbled in a voice too low to
be heard . " There , there ."
Yossarian was cold , too , and shivering uncontrollably....
It
was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter,
that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window and he 'll
fall . Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he 'll rot , like
other kinds of garbage . The spirit gone, man is garbage. That
was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all.
Impelled perhaps by the unconscious Jewish identification, Heller
paraphrases the famous "humanizing" speech of Shylock. ("If you
prick us, do we not bleed?
if
you tickle us , do we not laugh?
if
you
poison us, do we not die?") But the final allusion
to
Lear
is breath-
