Catch-22 recap

During the Second World War, bombardier Yossarian is stationed with an American bomber group on a Mediterranean island, certain that everyone is trying to kill him and desperate to be grounded before he is killed. He is thwarted by Catch-22, the maddening rule that a man must be crazy to keep flying missions but that anyone who asks to be excused thereby proves he is sane and must keep flying. His scheming commander, Colonel Cathcart, keeps raising the number of missions required, so the finish line is never reached. Around Yossarian swirls a cast of absurd figures, including the profiteering mess officer Milo Minderbinder, whose black-market syndicate consumes the war effort, and the meek chaplain. As friends die one after another and the horror of a gunner's death aboard his plane finally overwhelms him, Yossarian resolves to stop cooperating. Offered a corrupt bargain to go home in exchange for praising his superiors, he refuses, and, learning that the vanished Orr has escaped to neutral Sweden, he deserts to try to follow him.

The novel is set during the Second World War on the small Mediterranean island of Pianosa, where an American bombing group flies missions over Italy. Its central figure is Yossarian, a bombardier gripped by the certainty that everyone, the enemy above and his own commanders below, is out to kill him, and obsessed with staying alive. He takes refuge in the base hospital by faking ailments, anything to avoid flying more combat missions. His great obstacle is Catch-22, the circular regulation holding that a flier must be insane to be excused from missions, yet any man who requests to be excused proves by his concern for his own safety that he is sane, and so must keep flying. Around Yossarian moves a large cast of officers and airmen rendered by turns comic and horrifying, and his commander keeps raising the number of missions required, ensuring the ordeal never ends. Told out of order and in a darkly absurd key, the story circles the madness and cruelty of the war.

Worn down by mounting deaths and the ever-rising mission count, and haunted above all by the memory of watching the young gunner Snowden die in his arms, Yossarian finally refuses to fly any more missions and walks around in protest. His commanders, Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Korn, embarrassed by his defiance, offer him a deal: they will send him home as a hero if he agrees to like them and to publicly endorse them, a bargain that would betray the other men still forced to fly. Yossarian nearly accepts, then rejects the corrupt offer. His decision is sealed when he learns that his odd tentmate Orr, whose repeated crash-landings turn out to have been deliberate practice, has made it safely to neutral Sweden. Seeing that escape is possible after all, Yossarian deserts, slipping away to strike out for Sweden himself and refusing any longer to be a pawn in a system that treats men's lives as expendable. His flight is an act of self-preservation and moral refusal, choosing his own survival and conscience over an insane war and the ambitions of the men running it.