Meditations on a Reading from "Catch-22"

Meditations on a Reading from Catch-22

A reading from Catch-22:

A boy in a thin shirt and thin tattered trousers walked out of the darkness on bare feet. The boy had black hair and needed a haircut and shoes and socks. His sickly face was pale and sad. His feet made grisly, soft, sucking sounds in the rain puddles on the wet pavement as he passed, and Yossarian was moved by such intense pity for his poverty that he wanted to smash his pale, sad, sickly face with his fist and knock him out of existence because he brought to mind all the pale, sad, sickly children in Italy that same night who needed haircuts and needed shoes and socks.

This scene takes place in Italy in the last years of World War II. Throughout the novel, Yossarian has been trying desperately to escape from the seemingly unavoidable fact of death, with humorous results. He has seen death all around him, witnessed grisly deaths first hand -- and he wants out. He has gone AWOL in order to consider how to handle his situation now that it has come to a crisis point, and he continually comes upon hopeless, pointless scenes of suffering, of which this is only one. He can only walk on.

A similar scene occurs in American Psycho. The protagonist goes up to a homeless man on the street who begs him for help. He tells him to get a job and shoots him in cold blood, and the audience stifles a laugh. It's the most horrible thing in the world, but the audience seriously isn't sure whether it's supposed to laugh at this murder of a homeless man. It's just so utterly ridiculous, right? Who would ever want to kill a homeless man? We have nothing but pity for those poor men living out on the street. We sometimes find them amusing, sitting on their little corner, especially the cheerful little black man making the stereotypical kinds of comments. We don't like them so much when they're playing musical instruments or when they're selling the stupid magazines: we don't like them when they're obviously drug addicts or seem like they could probably get a job easily (i.e., are young white men). We especially don't like them when they're mentally disturbed, when something's just not right in their eyes, when they creep us out in their disconnectedness from the world around them.

And why do we dislike them so much? Obviously, it's because they show that our System doesn't work, right? They are a guide to the failures of Late Capitalism, the extreme manifestation of a medicated society or of any other currently trendy idea. We're all bourgeois, so we feel very uncomfortable with these people, and well we should. They will lead to the downfall of our System soon enough, and we feel insecure. That's why we wonder whether to laugh about the scene in American Psycho (perhaps why we're glad to read the word "Psycho" in that movie's title). Of course none of us wants to murder anyone, because it's against the law, right? No one wants to go to jail. But don't we all feel threatened by these people on the margins who manage to live day after day without "buying in?" Isn't our complacency as a class put into question by these poor souls? Don't they call out for widespread social reform, for a radical change in the society from which we benefit?

But what of Yossarian's little boy? Does he cry out for social reform? Does Yossarian say that he doesn't want to look at this child because Yossarian has bought into the System? At this point in the novel, Yossarian has been beaten up by the system, forced to fly a ridiculous number of dangerous bombing runs, lost several of his friends, seen one of his fellow soldiers disemboweled, seen another chopped to shreds in a plane's propellers: he is not afraid of reform. He has nothing to lose but the obligation to expose himself daily to death. He wants to destroy this child because the child needs shoes and needs a haircut and needs medical attention and needs food and because Yossarian owes that to him, without condition. And he owes all these things to all the children who come to mind, all the poor Italian children, all the poor African children, all the poor Afghani children: he owes each and every one of them everything they need, everything he is, and he knows this. The book is the story of his trying to escape from this web of obligation, this absolutely disturbing and absolutely unsolvable problem that he has to give everything up.

He could rationalize and say that it would be no fair to supply this child with his needs without supplying the others with their needs. This would only be to wait for a distant revolution in society in which everything, suddenly, would be absolutely fair and perfect and just. He could rationalize and say that he can't go starving himself in order to feed every poor child. This would be to value himself above others, the most instinctive and at the same time the most irrational position one could (and does) take. What right does he have to the things that he has? What right does he have to experience pleasure while others experience pain, to live while others die?

Yossarian does escape. He runs from death, runs from his ridiculous duties, runs to the paradise of Sweden, a neutral territory in history's greatest war. He claims he will help others along the way, that he's done what he could, but he hasn't. He lies to himself, as we all must. And that is what makes the scene from American Psycho so disturbingly funny: not that anyone would do such a terrible thing, but that anyone could be so absolutely honest.