228). Bryant also went on to say that "Catch-22 is the great social tautology that imprisons every individual who takes it as a natural absolute and does not see that it is a kind of language-game (Bryant 229). Others such as Pinsker state that "Catch-22's extraordinary achievement can be measured in terms of its radical departure from the convictions that had governed previous war novels" (Pinsker 381).Most negative criticism of Catch-22 centers around Heller's style in the novel. Specifically, they feel the novel lacks unity and coherence. Many critics go as far as to say "Catch-22 is not even a good novel by convential standards" (Prescott online). Burhans, for example, attributes this to " the constant episodic zigzags which comprise Catch-22's narrative surface" (230). Others credit their negative criticism to "Catch-22's dizzying repetitions and seemingly disjointed narrative" (Pinsker 385). Similarly, Brustein says that Catch-22 contains "some of the most outrageous sequence since A Night at the Opera" (228).The themes of Catch-22 depict the classic struggle between man's desire to survive and the system's desire to crush man for its own gain. The central theme of the novel expresses the preposterousness and the excesses of life during wartime, while it points out the madness of the bureaucratic systems ("Themes" online). This madness is best displayed in the phrase "catch-22 [a situation in which a desired outcome or solution is impossible to attain because of a set of inherently illogical rules or conditions]," coined by Heller (Pinsker 379). A "catch-22" disables man's control over his own life and guarantees that control to a system that seeks only to benefit itself without care toward what it costs (Olderman 229). Frederick R. Karl said, "Beneath the surface all avid readers are afraid that life - whatever it is - is dribbling away from them in ways they can never dam" (135). Karl's analysis illustrates the theme of loss of...
