catch 22

Symbols of catch-22

Yossarian is an American airman in world war two who has to endure a nightmarish existence defined by bureaucracy: they are inhuman resources in the eyes of their blindly ambitious superior officers. The squadron is thrown into brutal combat situations and bombing runs in which it is more important for the squadron members to capture good aerial photos of explosions than to destroy their targets. Their colonels continually raise the number of missions that they are required to fly before being sent home, so that no one is ever sent home. Meanwhile all Yossarian wants is to leave the military. The symbols I used to depict the theme, main character, time period and setting of the novel Catch-22 portray the books image mood and overall feel very well.
The themes aspect of my visual was portrayed by the jail type bars running across the page with a Nazi swastika, airplanes and a man with his hands clenching the bars in the background. This is depicting the absolute power of bureaucracy and how Yossarian could not escape it. “These Bureaucrats think that we are expendable, when these planes fall out of the sky every day”(Heller, 183).
The Man with his hands clenching the prison bars at the bottom of the page is the main character, Yossarian. I chose to portray him as a prisoner because in the book Yossarian feels as if he is trapped by his superior officers and the Nazi enemy. “I felt like a prisoner, a prisoner of war in my own army. I was trapped” (Heller, 317). I chose to put him behind bars because that’s where he felt like he was emotionally.
To describe the setting and time the book took place in I used Adolf Hitlers face and the Nazi swastika as a resemblance of world war two. Yossarian (main character) fought against the Nazi party and In my opinion the most memorable thing about world war two is Hitler, he was a very unique, sick, twisted individual and for the wrong reasons he will never be forgotten. “All of this is Hitlers doing, if he didn’t have such a hunger for territory we wouldn’t be in this mess” (Heller, 249).
The prison bars depict to complete power of bureaucracy and the imprisonment it holds upon people. The man at the bottom is the main character Yossarian, showing that he is a prisoner of bureaucracy and that he can’t escape. Hitlers head and the Nazi swastika shows the time period being world war two. All together I believe that the symbols I used in my visual to define the novel Catch-22 were well thought out and connected to the books storyline and portrayed the story the way it was meant to be seen by the reader.