Closing Time (novel)

Closing Time, first published in 1994, is Joseph Heller's sequel to the popular Catch-22. It takes place in New York City in the 1990s, and revisits some characters of the original -- Yossarian, Milo Minderbinder and Chaplain Tappman. Just like the original Catch-22, this sequel opens with Yossarian in a hospital bed, flirting with the nurses. Now in his late sixties, Yossarian is depressed by his perfect health: things can only get worse. He lives alone in a Manhattan apartment not far from most of his old war buddies, including Milo Minderbinder, a defense contractor straight out of Dr. Strangelove. Yossarian describes his role in the corporation as "one of the associates". Yossarian and company mourn the decline of New York City and American culture in general and look back longingly to the golden age of prewar Coney Island. The symbolic center of the book is a surreal wedding extravaganza held at the Port Authority Bus Terminal and hosted by Minderbinder, who recruits highly paid actors to portray derelicts and prostitutes. At the end of Closing Time, both Yossarian and the chaplain apparently decide to commit passive suicide. Both were deep within the bowels of the earth, safe from an impending nuclear holocaust the President of the United States launched, believing he was playing a video game. Both decided to go back to the surface. Yossarian decides to keep his lunch date with his girlfriend; the chaplain boards a bus to go home to Kenosha, Wisconsin. This work attempts the same sort of giddy black humor that made its predecessor a classic, but the underlying mood is somber, almost elegiac. The book is an oddity, in that two stories are interwoven throughout - that of Yossarian, and that of Sammy Singer, who is named as the tailgunner in Catch-22 who kept waking up and fainting when he saw Yossarian trying to attend to the wounds of Snowden. The tale of Sammy Singer is completely different in mood and style, and seems to be an attempt either at writing a novel within a novel, or of trying to combine two unfinished works. The tale of Sammy Singer is extremely nostalgic and is written in the first person. The only connections between the two stories are Catch-22, references made by Singer to Yossarian and the war, and a chance meeting of the two. One notable inconsistency in the book is that although Yossarian was 28 in Catch-22, which took place in 1944, in Closing Time, Yossarian is 68, and the time of Catch-22 is referred to as "50 years ago". There is a man mentioned by Sammy Singer's friend Lew named Vonnegut whom he met while in Dresden. This is a reference to Kurt Vonnegut's experiences in the Bombing of Dresden and his book Slaughterhouse-Five.