Personal Reading

As a bit of a personal reading project I went ahead and tried diving back into Catch-22 from where I left it in the fall when our reading group agreed to abandon it because of it's long pages and structure. Unlike them, I actually found the book to be read rather quickly, even through the more incongruous parts. Personally, I find the book to be just as enjoyable as I did when I first started reading it. It uses so much hypocrisy and seems almost too true to real life for this aspect. Everyone has their secrets, personal quarrels, agendas, and desires that may or may not conflict with each other at any given point in time, and Catch-22 does a marvelous job of illustrating just how all of these things get in the way of the world turning and life going on in a personal sense. The book, for me, speaks volumes about the human condition, the breakdown of morals (as well as morale), and the overall desperation that comes with trying to get out of a situation that breaks men and their characters. It exactly defines what it's like to be in a war, where everything but yourself is an enemy while you're considered someone else's enemy, but you don't exist to make enemies and you don't want to make enemies. I will say I understand my fellow group-mates' plight, however, as I can't see most people understanding what exactly is being said in the story (there are times where even I have to reread some parts, and I'm rather adept I would say at reading this kind of writing). There's plenty of times, even, when the book doesn't seem to want to make sense in the first place and needs to be taken in strides. It's a book where not everything's important ( unlike what Dickens would have you believe, with his five paragraphs of describing a rock in a wheat field) and where some things are just there to be there, which makes it all the more realistic in my opinion. Yossarian, the main character, is not someone who knows why everything exists like a typical main protagonist, nor should he be if he's meant to be defined as an actual person. In fact, several of the other characters of the book are made out to be the exact same way, some of them don't even know things that their job in the story requires them to know. Joseph Heller does an amazing job with this kind of disjointed realism, and it really shines within the book's content. It goes to even further lengths to capitalize on this realism further into the book and I hope to find more of this kind of realism and witty humor in the following parts of the book.