In the following essay, Nagel explores Heller's writing process for Catch-22, finding the early draft manuscripts rich with implications for the final published version of the novel.

In the following essay, Craig discusses the influence of Heller's World War II experience as a pilot over Avignon on the writing of Catch-22.

In the following essay, Pratt explores parallels between Catch-22 and the experience of fighting in the Vietnam War.

In the following essay, Green examines the lighter aspects of Heller's Catch-22, contending that because critics frequently focus on darker themes in black humor fiction, the comic aspects of these works are often neglected.

Catch-22 is a linguistic construct that requires people to do whatever their superiors wish. The novel is an examination of the destructive power of language when language is used for manipulation rather than communication. It is based on the existential premise that although the universe is irrational, people create rational systems. The linguistic expressions of these rational systems are cultural myths. People live by these myths whether or not they describe reality…. Catch-22, accordingly, points...

[Good as Gold] is being touted by its publisher as doing for the White House what Catch-22 did for the military of World War II—that is, a demolition job on our more positive illusions. The method is certainly the same: Every cliched absurdity is played straight and at length; a lot of little jokes illumine the big joke, which is that everything is a bad joke. But the timing is off…. This inevitably blunts the effect of Heller's tardy absurdities and makes the bad joke seem merely old. ...

[The essence of Catch-22 is that though it is ostensibly about the 1941–1945 war, in which Heller served, it is] really about The Next War, and thus about a war which will be without limits and without meaning, a war that will end only when no one is alive to fight it. The theme of Catch-22 … is the total craziness of war, the craziness of all those who submit to it, and the struggle to survive by one man, Yossarian, who knows the difference between his sanity and the insanity of the system. B...

"Catch-22" is probably the finest novel published since World War II. "Catch-22" is the great representative document of our era, linking high and low culture, with its extraordinary double-helix form, its all-American G.I.-comedy characters, its echoes of Twain, Faulkner, Hemingway, Miller and Céline. Its only rival is Pynchon's gargantuan "Gravity's Rainbow"—much larger, more learned and intelligent, but top-heavy, and a colder, deadly ...