In the spirit of satire, Joseph Heller enjoys subverting familiar, stock quotations from literature in Catch-22. Chapter 24 begins with subverted allusions to both Eliot The Waste Land and Tennyson Locksley Hall: "April had been the best month of all for Milo. . . . April was spring, and in the spring Milo Minderbinder's fancy had lightly turned to thoughts of tangerines" ( Heller 257). Part of the book's comic appeal, this sort of literary slapstick also serves the additional purpose of undermining the conventional attitudes which lead to bureaucratic thinking and, in the context of Catch-22, to death.

As with familiar poems, Heller occasionally draws on the plays of Shakespeare to reinforce his irony. In his note "Shakespearean Echoes in Catch22," Michael Larsen has shown how allusions to Shakespeare Hamlet and King Lear serve satiric and thematic purposes in the novel. However, Heller occasionally draws on other Shakespearean plays as well. For example, in Twelfth Night Malvolio mistakenly and immodestly assumes that the following lines refer to himself: "Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em" (II, v, 145-46). In the world of Catch22, where regulations contradict themselves, Heller twists these Shakespearean lines into mock praise for Major Major's lack of personality: "Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. With Major Major it had been all three. Even among men lacking all distinction he inevitably stood out as a man lacking more distinction than all the rest" ( Heller 85).

An allusion to The Merchant of Venice strikes a more serious note, as Heller uses the familiar speech by Shylock which begins, "Hath not a Jew eyes?" and continues, "if you prick us do we not bleed? if you tickle us do we not laugh? if you poison us do we not die? and if you wrong us shall we not revenge?" (III.i.59, 64-67). The Anabaptist Chaplain Tappman laments that other men refuse to behave normally around him, using some of Shylock's words: "Why couldn't anybody understand that he was not really a freak but a normal, lonely adult trying to lead a normal, lonely adult life? If they pricked him, didn't he bleed? And if he was tickled, didn't he laugh?" ( Heller277). Jewish himself, perhaps Heller found amusement in giving to a shy, Christlike shepherd persecuted by his own flock a speech in defense of revenge upon Christians. But the echo also reminds us of the chaplain's essential humanity which, like Shylock's, is overlooked by those who can see him only as a religious stereotype. Major Major's distinction is his lack of distinction and the chaplain's is his being not-a-Baptist; identities of these two men are nullified by the way Heller describes them, much as Doc Daneeka goes about the squadron unrecognized once his erroneous paperwork declares him to be dead. Heller's use of allusions against the direction of their original meanings is consistent with the novel's underlying strategy, to show the logical negation of life by institutional contradictions.

In a similar vein, Larsen's discussion of Shakespearean echoes focuses on how Heller uses Hamlet and King Lear to establish a "vision of the destructive and creative impulses at work in man and society" (78). Edgar's gloomy observation that "Ripeness is all" (V. ii. 11) becomes for Heller the final expression of a truth revealed incrementally until the end of the next-to-last chapter: "The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all" ( Heller450).

An additional echo appears a few pages later, in the last chapter of Catch22, which Heller may have written with King Lear still in his mind. Yossarian, about to leap from his hospital bed, counters Major Danby's worry that Yossarian's actions may play into the hands of Colonels Korn and Cathcart: "Let the bastards thrive, for all I care, since I can't do a thing to stop them but embarrass them by running away" ( Heller462). The phrase "let the bastards thrive" may have been inspired, perhaps unconsciously, by Lear's words to Gloucester as he dismissed Goneril and Regan: "Let copulation thrive; for Gloucester's bastard son / Was kinder to his father than my daughters / Got 'tween the lawful sheets" (IV. vi. 116-18). Lear's tone of bitter resignation to the way things are is different from Yossarian's more hopeful decision to escape; nevertheless, the bureaucratic nightmare-world of Catch-22, where Yossarian has just found himself arrested for being in Rome without a pass, while his companion's rape and murder of a young girl has excited little notice, seems no less absurd to Yossarian than a world where gods "kill us for their sport" seems to Lear.

METROPOLITAN STATE COLLEGE

EAST TEXAS STATE UNIVERSITY

William E. McCarron

WORKS CITED

Heller, Joseph. Catch-22. 1961 . New York: Dell, 1962.