ess lies very near the surface of human nature and can break through at any time in any place. In recent public discussions,the author has been heard to say that now is a good time to be old, since it is so hard to maintain hope in the face of the current manifestations of cruelty and themoral maze of the times. For his generation the axis of good and evil had - or was thought to have - a single fulcrum. Now the debate among competing goods andevils is bewildering and easily leads to despair. This novel - one of the century's greatest and one whose subtleties I have only begun to convey - turns on whathappens at the intersection of character and the institutionalised reifications and cruelties of debased societies and societies at war, internally and with nominallyexternal enemies. There is a fine line, a thin veneer, represented in the book by Yossarian and the chaplain, Captain R. O. Shipman, one an Assyrian, the other anAnabaptist. I take this to mean that Joseph Heller believes that insofar as decency is being husbanded and cultured, it is not in the mainstream of the society. Thiswas undoubtedly true in the period when he was a young man in the 1930s and 1940s, as he recalled in a recent television interview: the left was marginalised buthad morality on its side.The line between integrity and selling out and entering the morass of moral relativism is easily crossed. When they had the chaplain cornered, he dreamed up adisease for himself. He lied. 'The chaplain had sinned, and it was good. Common sense told him that telling lies and defecting from duty were sins. On the otherhand, everyone knew that sin was evil and that no good could come from evil. But he did feel good; he felt positively marvellous. Consequently, it followed logicallythat telling lies and defecting from duty could not be sins. The chaplain had mastered, in a moment of divine intuition, the handy technique of protective rationalization,and he was exhilarated by hi...
