John Yossarian
First Appearance: Catch-22
Date of First Appearance: 1961
Author: Joseph Heller (1923–1999)
The enemy is anybody who’s going to get you killed, no matter which side he’s on.
Alan Arkin couldn’t capture his personality in a 1970 film, and Richard Dreyfuss couldn’t do it in a 1973 pilot that failed to get off the ground. Whether Christopher Abbott can make him come alive in an upcoming TV miniseries remains to be seen, but the Vegas odds can’t be good. Yossarian is an elusive character.
One of literature’s great antiheroes, U.S. Army Air Forces bombardier Capt. John Yossarian is a quirkier, crazier, craftier, and more complex version of Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener, who confounded his employer with an “I would prefer not to” response to every directive. In Joseph Heller’s 1961 classic World War II novel, Yossarian takes passive resistance to epic heights.
Yossarian agrees that the U.S. infantry deserves air support, “but not necessarily by me.” Though he never actually refuses to fly missions, to avoid enemy fire he drops his bombs farther and farther from the target each time. Yossarian flies forty-four missions and the men like him because, unlike a bombardier who flies straight to the target and puts everyone at risk, Yossarian always takes extreme evasive action—so much so that his formation can hardly keep up with him. Like Orr, the man he shares a tent with, Yossarian tries to figure out ways to get out of fighting, not because he’s unpatriotic or afraid, but because his sense of self-preservation is so acute. “They’re trying to kill me,” he complains, unswayed by the argument that it’s all part of war. He may think of himself as a coward, but his “unwillingness to entrust the evasive action out of the target area to anybody else” shows that his self-preservationist concerns extend to his men. Readers witness him tending to a wounded crewman after their plane is hit and trying to strangle a crewman who’s too flippant about the man’s injury. Once he even goes against his instincts and takes six planes on a second pass of their target, resulting in a successful bombing run but the loss of a plane and its crew. And when the military brass decide to give him a medal, he shows up in formation nude to accept it.
No flag-waver, Yossarian drinks and swears and says things like “Fuck my superiors” because he realizes that “most of my superiors were not superior.” He is annoyed by “a fair-haired boy from Iowa who believed in God, Motherhood and the American Way of Life, without ever thinking about any of them,” and at the officer’s club that he takes pride in not helping to build, he wants to “machine-gun” people at the bar for singing “sentimental old favorites that nobody else tired of.” Instead, he stomps a Ping-Pong ball that rolls toward him. “That Yossarian,” two officers chuckle.
When we meet him, Yossarian is goldbricking in the hospital, where he and other officers are forced to censor enlisted men’s letters home. Instead of redacting sensitive information, Yossarian subverts the process by declaring “death to all modifiers” one day, axing the articles the next, and censoring everything in one letter except “Dear Mary” while adding a love postscript at the bottom from the chaplain. Instead of using his own name, he signs his censored letters “Washington Irving,” and that same irreverence leads him to approach a general at the officer’s club while drunk and ask if he’s heard about the new 340 mm Lepage gun that the Germans have—Lepage being a brand of glue.
If it were up to Yossarian, he would spend the rest of the war in the hospital, though it too was “a dangerous place” because “people died there.” Yossarian makes frequent trips there because he’s maintained a fairly constant 101-degree fever and has everything that would indicate jaundice—except for having no yellow skin and conveniently forgetting to tell doctors that his liver pain actually subsided. “Why must we wait for symptoms? Can’t we at least do a biopsy?” he asks. “Or anything that’s accessible and simple?” Add to that a growing paranoia that two private detectives are following him for some reason, and Yossarian seems crazy. But maybe, compared to the other officers and enlisted men stationed with him on the fictional Mediterranean island of Pianosa, he’s the sanest of them all.
Sanity is the main theme of Heller’s comic novel, where bureaucracy is ridiculously circuitous and everything seems to be some form of a Catch-22 (a term Heller coined). As the squadron’s doctor explains to Yossarian, who had declared he was going to go insane in order to avoid flying more missions, “Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn’t really crazy.” Yossarian “was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.” Everything in the novel has the same catch, as an old Italian woman explains when MPs round up the homeless whores Yossarian had been sheltering in an apartment: “Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything they can’t stop them from doing.”
Yossarian may be an antihero, but he’s really quite moral, in his own antiauthoritarian way. When he questions targeting a village and the colonel asks why, he responds, “It’s cruel, that’s why.” In Rome, though the other flyboys don’t care what age the “whores” are, Yossarian tries to help a twelve-year-old girl. “You’ve got daughters . . . don’t you know what I’m talking about?” When his superiors coerce him into posing as the dying son of parents who have traveled across the world to see him, he pretends to be their son but insists his name is Yossarian. When an airman plots to kill Colonel Cathcart for constantly raising the number of missions they have to fly, Yossarian refuses to take part, though he too is opposed to that numbers racket. And when the mess officer asks him to go in on a “surefire plan for cheating the federal government,” Yossarian declines. “That’s what I like about you,” Milo responds. “You’re honest!”
Catch-22 never appeared on the New York Times Best Seller List, but it has sold more than 10 million copies. The book was originally called Catch-18, but then someone at Simon & Schuster read in Publisher’s Weekly that Leon Uris was coming out with a book titled Mila 18 the same year, and they decided to change the title. Heller worked two hours a day and produced a page of polished prose per day over seven years. But the sequel was thirty-three years in the making. When Closing Time finally appeared in 1994, a reviewer for the New York Times acknowledged that Catch-22 had become “an enduring part of the lexicon” and “helped change America’s view of war.” In Closing Time, he wrote, “Yossarian, the cynical bombardier who spent World War II trying to get out of flying any more missions, has married twice, worked as a teacher, an advertising executive and a failed screenwriter, and finally became a business and public relations consultant.” He even ends up working for Milo’s military-industrial company. In other words, Yossarian becomes unfortunately more establishment and less funny than he was in Catch-22—which remains his ticket to literary immortality.
Bibliography
Catch-22 (1961)
Closing Time (1994)
Works Cited
“Joseph Heller Interview with Bill Boggs.” BillBoggsTV, YouTube video, 9:03. Posted May 3, 2012, by BillBoggsTV. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0eiqJ_TQE8.
Lyall, Sarah. “In ‘Catch-22’ Sequel, Heller Brings Back Yossarian, Milo, et al.” New York Times, February 16, 1994. https://www.nytimes.com/1994/02/16/books/in-catch-22-sequel-heller-brings-back-yossarian-milo-et-al.html.
—JP