“Catch-22” By Joseph - Khamkoo

“Catch-22” By Joseph Heller 102
and over again.’
‘That’s really very funny,’ the old man replied. ‘All the time I thought his name was
Giuseppe, and now I find out his name is Yossarian. That’s really very funny.’
‘Ma, make him feel good,’ the brother urged. ‘Say something to cheer him up.’
‘Giuseppe.’
‘It’s not Giuseppe, Ma. It’s Yossarian.’
‘What difference does it make?’ the mother answered in the same mourning tone,
without looking up. ‘He’s dying.’ Her tumid eyes filled with tears and she began to cry,
rocking back and forth slowly in her chair with her hands lying in her lap like fallen
moths. Yossarian was afraid she would start wailing. The father and brother began
crying also. Yossarian remembered suddenly why they were all crying, and he began
crying too. A doctor Yossarian had never seen before stepped inside the room and told
the visitors courteously that they had to go. The father drew himself up formally to say
goodbye.
‘Giuseppe,’ he began.
‘Yossarian,’ corrected the son.
‘Yossarian,’ said the father.
‘Giuseppe,’ corrected Yossarian.
‘Soon you’re going to die.’ Yossarian began to cry again. The doctor threw him a dirty
look from the rear of the room, and Yossarian made himself stop.
The father continued solemnly with his head lowered. ‘When you talk to the man
upstairs,’ he said, ‘I want you to tell Him something for me. Tell Him it ain’t right for
people to die when they’re young. I mean it. Tell Him if they got to die at all, they got to
die when they’re old. I want you to tell Him that. I don’t think He knows it ain’t right,
because He’s supposed to be good and it’s been going on for a long, long time. Okay?’
‘And don’t let anybody up there push you around,’ the brother advised. ‘You’ll be just
as good as anybody else in heaven, even though you are Italian.’
‘Dress warm,’ said the mother, who seemed to know.
Colonel Cathcart
Colonel Cathcart was a slick, successful, slipshod, unhappy man of thirty-six who
lumbered when he walked and wanted to be a general. He was dashing and dejected,
poised and chagrined. He was complacent and insecure, daring in the administrative
stratagems he employed to bring himself to the attention of his superiors and craven in
his concern that his schemes might all backfire. He was handsome and unattractive, a
swashbuckling, beefy, conceited man who was putting on fat and was tormented
chronically by prolonged seizures of apprehension. Colonel Cathcart was conceited
because he was a full colonel with a combat command at the age of only thirty-six; and
Colonel Cathcart was dejected because although he was already thirty-six he was still
only a full colonel.
Colonel Cathcart was impervious to absolutes. He could measure his own progress
only in relationship to others, and his idea of excellence was to do something at least as
well as all the men his own age who were doing the same thing even better. The fact
that there were thousands of men his own age and older who had not even attained the
rank of major enlivened him with foppish delight in his own remarkable worth; on the
other hand, the fact that there were men of his own age and younger who were already
generals contaminated him with an agonizing sense of failure and made him gnaw at his
fingernails with an unappeasable anxiety that was even more intense than Hungry
Joe’s.
Colonel Cathcart was a very large, pouting, broadshouldered man with close-cropped
curly dark hair that was graying at the tips and an ornate cigarette holder that he
purchased the day before he arrived in Pianosa to take command of his group. He
displayed the cigarette holder grandly on every occasion and had learned to manipulate
it adroitly. Unwittingly, he had discovered deep within himself a fertile aptitude for