Catch-22 has sold over ten million copies, and the term "Catch-22" has become a familiar catch-phrase.
Catch-22 is a satirical, often surreal novel which tells the story of a World War II bombardier who is crazy enough to want to stop going out on bombing missions, but not crazy enough to be sent home. The novel does more than emphasize the absurdity of war through the perspective of its anti- hero, Yossarian, and the use of "black humor"; it criticizes bureaucracy, commodification, and contemporary American ideals. According to Thomas R. Edwards, writing in the New York Review of Books, the novel is "brave and essentially truthful in saying what organizations, military or otherwise, do to the minds and values of their members."
Heller's other works, less enthusiastically received than his first novel, are linked thematically and stylistically with Catch-22. As George J. Searles noted in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Heller's first three novels have different targets (the military in Catch-22, "the corporate realm" in Something Happened, and the government in Good As Gold), but in "each context, he focuses on an alienated, antiheroic protagonist struggling to identify his own priorities and reconcile them with the large system by which he is ensnared and controlled.
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