avity. Two of the most amusing minor characters - Nately and Hungry Joe - die in this off-hand way. Similarly, the frat-man Aarfy rapes awoman and throws her out a window, blandly, and gets away with it in the teeth of Yossarian's shouting that it is wrong, and he will be punished (p.409). This comes at the end of a sustained walk through the streets of Rome, where he sees tableau after tableau of cruelty, rape, gang rape, beating of children and a dog(which reminds him of the beating of the horse in Raskolnikov's dream (p. 405), thus evoking the ubiquity of the theme of pointless suffering and murder. There is along passage on hypocrisy and the perverse inversion of values: 'What a lousy earth! ...How many winners were losers, successes failures, rich men poor men? Howmany wise guys were stupid? How many happy endings were unhappy endings? How many honest men were liars, brave men cowards, loyal men traitors, howmany sainted men were corrupt, how many people in positions of trust had sold their souls to blackguards for petty cash, how many had never had souls? Howmany straight-and-narrow paths were crooked paths? How many best families were worst families and how many good people were bad people? When you addedthem all up and then subtracted, you might be left with only the children, and perhaps with Albert Einstein and an old violinist or sculptor somewhere' (p. 403). He ishere at the brink of cynicism, experiencing life as a nightmare, and is sorely in need of redemption: 'The night was filled with horrors, and he thought he knew howChrist might have felt as he walked through the world, like a psychiatrist through a ward full of nuts, like a victim through a prison full of thieves. What a welcomesight a leper must have been!' (p. 405).I have, of course, had in mind contemporary events as I have written this essay. I have, that is, returned to Catch-22, because present events in the world haverevived the sense that wanton destructiven...
