Just Sex in Heller’s Catch-22?

Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22 is well known for its humorous depiction of the absurdities of war and military bureaucracy. What it is less well known for is the moral evolution of its protagonist, John Yossarian—which, ironically, was Heller’s stated purpose in Catch-22. Yossarian’s moral progress reveals itself in the evolution of his attitudes and behaviors toward women; yet, this is obfuscated by the novel’s tone—Heller’s use of absurdist humor—that extends to its sexual interactions, many of which are violent and non-consensual. Herein lies the problem: while they may involve absurdity, modern readers will likely not find them humorous. Scholarly attempts at decoding a formula of absurdist humor in the novel ignore these interactions or, worse, assume they are simply amusing. Against this, we identify a pattern of absurdist humor in which the novel’s sexual interactions provoke the protagonist’s unobvious and incomplete moral development.