Unifying Elements and Structural Patterns in Joseph Heller´s Catch 22

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 2,7, University of Potsdam, course: American Literature and War, language: English, abstract: Joseph Heller´s Catch 22 has received much feedback since its publishment in 1961. Critics differ in their opions about Heller´s first novel. Reviews in Time,the London Observer, Newsweek or Saturday Review expressed the enthusiasm which the novel caused among its readers. Robert Brustein called Catch 22 an “explosive, bitter, subversive, brilliant book”, The Times said: “Written with brilliance…echoes with mad laughter…magnificient.” These are only two examples of many positive responses towards the book. But as usual there also have been various negative critics about Catch 22. Some reviewers found Heller´s book “unpatriotic, its sexual references offensive, its style repetitious, its structure incoherent, its characters unbelievable.”Others even argued that the book is not a novel, that it doesn´t show any structural pattern or unifying elements. This work is supposed to show that Catch 22 contains structural patterns as well as unifying elements, that Heller´s first novel rightly deserves the positive reviews on his book. It starts to discover some of the most central themes in the book and then deals with a few structural patterns of Catch 22.