![]() ![]() ![]() But the more he tries, the more he is caught in the famous catch: "Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn't really crazy," Doc Daneeka, the Army physician, explains. Yossarian is Heller's nimble creation - an everyman soldier who is trying as hard as he can to get out of the war. ![]() "They are out to kill me personally, and he didn't like it - and Yossarian doesn't either." "After that mission over Avignon, Heller really understood that this is not an abstraction," Daugherty says. That mission, says Heller biographer Tracy Daugherty, shaped the way Heller thought about war, a sensibility that permeates his novel. Sitting in the plexiglass nose cone of a B-25 bomber, Heller faced the very real possibility of death for the first time. In August 1944, Heller flew on a mission over the French town of Avignon. And now, a half-century later, the predicament of a no-win trap still resonates with a new crop of young people distrustful of their elders. ![]() His take on war meshed perfectly with the anti-authoritarian generation that came of age in the 1960s. Fifty years ago, a new phrase began to make its way into American conversations: "Catch-22." Joseph Heller's irreverent World War II novel - named for the now-famous paradox - was published on Oct. ![]()
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