ut. Another chunk of flak more than three inchesbig had shot into his other side just underneath the arm and blasted all the way thorough, drawing mottled quarts of Snowden along with it through the gigantic hole inhis ribs it made as it blasted out. Yossarian screamed a second time and squeezed both hands over his eyes His teeth were chattering in horror. He forced himself tolook again. Here was God's plenty all right, he thought bitterly as he stared - liver, lungs, kidneys, ribs, stomach and bits of the stewed tomatoes Snowden had eatenthat day for lunch' (429)Snowden said again that he was cold, and Yossarian said again 'There, there.''Yossarian was cold, too, and shivering uncontrollably. He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden hadspilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window and he'll fall.Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all' (pp.429-30).There are two other passages written at this level of rhetorical power. One conveys great tenderness and is about Yossarian's loving Nurse Duckett as they lie bythe seaside. This flows into his reflections on people who die under water, his missing friends and his first sight of a corpse, and it ends with an account of thegratuitous death of Kid Sampson, as McWatt buzzes the swimming raft and makes a tiny miscalculation 'which slices the boy half away', followed by a sound, 'tsst',and the legs and hips toppled backwards, and then it rained Kid Sampson on all of them (pp. 331-2). This is but one of many deaths which take us completely bysurprise. They appear in the middle of a paragraph, sometimes in a subordinate clause, almost by the way, and convey an awful contingency, a callousness of God,nature and human depr...
