Irrationality In Joseph Heller's Catch 22

Irrational behavior exists as a paradox in which it can always be rationalized. Often, only a “discerning Eye” into madness can determine the justification of such behavior. In the novel Catch 22 by Joseph Heller, Heller offers a “discerning eye”, as described in Emily Dickinson’s poem “Much Madness is divinest sense”, on Yossarian’s madness to elicit its reasonability in a time of war. Yossarian, the protagonist, a soldier fighting for the United States in World War II, displays an antiheroic, anti-American sentiment in his time with the army - a sentiment often regarded as not only madness, but as an example of eccentricism arising from his mental delusion. Instead of fighting for America and executing mandatory missions, Yossarian deserts
In the opening of his journey in the war, Yossarian discovers that he could exploit the hospital by fabricating his sickness to avoid the war. In fact, after Yossarian escapes from the hospital after an encounter with a patriotic Texan, Heller states, “outside the hospital, the war was still going on. Men went mad and were rewarded with medals [...] and [Yossarian] might have stayed in the hospital until doomsday” (Heller 16). Yossarian’s stay at the hospital to desert the army and depart his duty while avoiding patriotism depicts him as eccentric, a behavior stemming from the mental delusion and madness that he possesses. However, Heller’s commentary on the fact that the men fighting in the war might be crazier than Yossarian’s exploits of the hospital illustrates Heller’s notion that war itself is irrational. By characterizing the mass killing of the enemy as mad, and the seemingly cowardly escape of the war as “lucky”, Heller reverses and justifies Yossarian’s madness by placing it in context of the war’s irrationality, further proving that individual lives, or in this case Yossarian’s life, exists on a greater importance than the army and war. Similar to how Yossarian attempts to desert the war through the hospital, Yossarian asks Doc Daneeka if he can desert because of his insanity. Doc Daneeka then informs Yossarian about Catch-22, where the only people who can leave the war are ones who are insane, but people who ask to leave the war are the only ones who are sane. Heller utilizes this paradox is a similar way as the scene at the hospital to prove that Yossarian is in fact sane by his unwillingness to fight and that the perpetrators of war are insane. By casting his “discerning Eye” on the situations of aborting and avoiding