Reading 'Catch-22'

De: Paul McDonald

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

Comic novelist and critic, Paul McDonald, provides an accessible, revealing guide to Joseph Heller’s seminal anti-war novel, Catch-22. McDonald succinctly contextualises this perplexing comedy in relation to the author’s life, and to key developments in modern American literature. The book offers a thorough account and analysis of the plot, considers important characters such as Colonel Cathcart, Milo Minderbinder, Lieutenant Scheisskopf, Major Major, and Doc Daneeka, and explains the various ways in which Yossarian’s hilarious predicament has been interpreted by critics. It considers Yossarian’s status as a mythic hero, an individualist hero, and a postmodern hero, assessing his relevance to contemporary America, and his re-emergence in the sequel to Catch-22, Closing Time, published in 1994. It also offers a descriptive bibliography of important secondary sources, and links to useful online texts. The Author, Paul McDonald is Senior Lecturer in American Literature and Course Leader for Creative Writing at the University of Wolverhampton. He is the author of eleven books, including three poetry collections and three comic novels. His criticism includes books on Philip Roth, the fiction of the Industrial Midlands, and 'Laughing at the Darkness' a study of postmodern American Humour also available in Kindle. His research focuses on comedy, and he takes a perverse pleasure in the fact that Googling ‘the oldest joke in the world’ generates several hundred pages with his name on.