Catch 22 Hospital Analysis

According to Thomas Allen Nelson, “significant in these recurring scenes is the setting of the hospital. In all three of these chapters, the hospital serves as a safe asylum from the outside world for Yossarian and Dunbar” (Nelson 2). Here, Nelson is showing that Joseph Heller’s use of the hospital is to mainly show that the hospital in Catch-22 by Joseph Heller is a means of escape from the atrocities of the war. However, Heller more importantly uses the hospital as a place where “the danger that the wound occasions results from the doctors who want to treat him by operating on [Yossarian’s] liver, not from treating the wound itself” (Craig 1). Instead of the hospital being a place of escape, the hospital is a place that brings even more
Throughout the novel, Heller exhibits Yossarian’s thought of the hospital as a place of protection from the absurdities of war. When Yossarian is voluntary in the hospital for a second time, Heller notes that “few people died unnecessarily. People knew a lot more about dying inside the hospital and made a much neater, more orderly job out of it. They couldn’t dominate Death inside the hospital, but they certainly made her behave” (Heller 165). Heller’s use of personification shows Death as being similar to an untamed animal. However, the hospital’s ability to tame Death shows the hospital as a stronger power over the evils of war. Here, Heller also contrasts the hospital with the battlefield. This makes the hospital look like a safe-haven compared to the massive amounts of destruction on the battlefield. Heller also points out that “outside the hospital the war was still going on. Men went mad and were rewarded with medals” (Heller 16). Here, Heller emphasizes how the values of war are absurd and that the only way for a character to be protected from it is to be in the hospital. He shows that there is
When the soldier in white arrives at the hospital, he was “encased from head to toe in plaster and gauze” and “sewn into the bandages over the insides of both elbows were zippered lips through which he was fed clear fluid from a clear jar” (Heller 10). Heller’s vast use of imagery exhibits the cruelty that the war puts on soldiers. Furthermore, here, Heller privileges the idea that the hospital is not an escape from war, but is an even further look into the war. Patients, like Yossarian, are permanently bombarded with the casualties of war every time a new patient comes in. Therefore, there is no way to avoid the war, even in a place that is associated with care and safety. When a new soldier in white comes into the hospital later in the novel, Heller uses imagery again by stating that the soldier in white was “encased from head to toe in plaster and gauze with both strange, rigid legs elevated from the hips and both strange arms strung up perpendicularly...” (Heller 167). By using imagery again to describe a soldier in white, Heller emphasizes that the dangers of war are endlessly present and that there is truly no such thing as a “safe-haven” when it comes to the war. Furthermore, by repeating some of the same words like “plaster” and “gauze”, Heller is able to show that the dangers of war affect nearly everyone and that