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He Took Off: Yosarian and the Different Drummer
Critic: Walter R. McDonald
Source: The CEA Critic, Vol. 36, No. 1, November, 1973, pp. 14-16. Reprinted in
Novels for Students, Vol. 1
Criticism about: Joseph Heller (1923-1999)
Genre(s): Short stories; Novels; Plays; Protest literature; Film scripts
In the following excerpt, McDonald places Yossarian's character within the tradition of "American rebels"
such as Huck Finn, Hester Prynne, and Ike McCaslin.
Yossarian of Joseph Heller's Catch-22 has been called a coward, an amoralist, a cop-out, a traitor.
Others see him as a casualty, an individualist, a prophet of love, the last soul true to himself. The first
readers object primarily because he "takes off," claiming this is artistically, patriotically, or morally no way
to end the book.
Yet Yossarian gives up safety, rewards, and a hero's homecoming when he flees. He is in fact following an
American tradition--escaping, or trying to escape, in order to save himself from absurdity, compromise, or
despair. In what Hemingway called the source of modern American literature, Huckleberry Finn, Twain's
puckish hero (after surviving a river's length of encounters with man's hideous inhumanity to man) also
"lights out" for the Indian Territory. The similarity is striking when we realize that Yossarian leaves rather
than be comfortably tamed and returned as a hero to the civilized States (for the glory of Colonels
Cathcart and Korn) and that Huck leaves to avoid the comfortable (but to him confining and
compromising) civilized family life.
There is in American fiction a tradition of heroes who "take off," or who renounce ease, or who deny
themselves pleasure in quest of individual rather than conventional fulfillment. This radical
individualism--absurd, perhaps, or ascetic--shows Yossarian at the end of the story to be not a cop-out,
but one of many rebels in a tradition of rebels.
Thoreau set the tradition's example and gave it voice in the concluding chapter of Walden: "If a man does
not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the
music which he hears, however measured or far away." Such a code romanticizes Natty Bumppo, for
example, who refuses the comfort of the Effinghams' cabin in The Pioneers, preferring the free wilderness
(and see his Lone Ranger solitude in the other Leatherstocking tales, as well).
In a spirit of free renunciation and penitence, Hester Prynne resumes her symbol in The Scarlet Letter,
long after anyone requires it. Hawthorne speculates that Pearl would "most joyfully" have entertained her
mother in England in regal comfort. But Hester hears a drum no others hear.
However much we may think Lambert Strether's ethics are precious and overstrained at the end of The
Ambassadors, we recognize in him another American individualist denying himself pleasure (marriage to
Miss Gostrey) in order to save his concept of honor.
As if reading Thoreau's urging as a command ("Enjoy the land, but own it not," from "Baker Farm" in
Walden), Faulkner's Ike McCaslin renounces his birthright to save himself and, he hopes, the land, which
has been cursed by slavery. Repeatedly, his cousin McCaslin Edmonds urges him to inherit the land and
demands a reason for his refusal. The involuted Part IV of "The Bear" is Ike's attempt to explain the call of
the different drummer he hears. Finally, even the temptation of his bride's sweet body is not enough to
break his resolve, and Ike becomes uncle to half a county and father to none.
With Frederick Henry the tradition begins to involve patriotism rather than mere personal gain. But since it
is the Italian Army, most readers easily allow him to take his farewell to Italian arms without rebuke. His
desertion seems hardly that, justified as it is by the absurd circumstances. Justified also by this American
code of individualism, he deserves to escape, deserves better surely than the tragic end, his farewell to
Catherine Barkley's English arms.
Because life in those times played such dirty tricks on individuals, we even allow an American like Jake
Barnes to exile himself in Europe after the war (The Sun Also Rises). Life in exile may not have been as
simple as a hero's return; it may, in fact, have required a certain asceticism for Jake Barnes to endure the
sad desperate crowd of his lost generation. But it is his solitary choice, preferring his troubled priestly life
among the lost to the sterile homecoming of young Krebs in "Soldier's Home."
But it is Yossarian himself, literally marching backwards with his gun on his hip, who is the fullest example
of Thoreau's man marching to a different drummer. At this same time of rebellion, he refuses to fly any
more missions because, as the final blow, Nately has been killed. It is this point, it would seem, which
critics would object to, rather than his actual desertion. For it is at this time, not when he runs away, that
Yossarian quits the fight.
When he refuses to fly, his superiors have two choices: to court-martial him or to let it pass. Seeing a
chance for profit to themselves, Colonels Cathcart and Korn offer him a deal: as Yossarian summarizes for
the chaplain, "They'll let me go home a big hero if I say nice things about them to everybody and never
criticize them to anyone for making the rest of the men fly more missions." It is such a "good deal" that
Colonel Korn says, "`You'd have to be a fool to throw it all away just for a moral principle.'"
But that is exactly what Yossarian does. The passage is Heller's donnée, the stipulation of the rules the rest
of his fiction is to be played by. The "deal" is what takes Yossarian out of the war. He does not desert
from combat; he takes off from a "luxurious, privileged existence" that he would "have to be a fool" to turn
down.
At first, even though he knows it would be "a pretty scummy trick" he would be playing on the men in his
squadron who would have to remain, Yossarian leaves his new "pals" the colonels exhilarated. "He was
home free: he had pulled it off; his act of rebellion had succeeded; he was safe, and he had nothing to be
ashamed of to anyone."
But after Nately's whore stabs him and as he is recovering in the hospital, Yossarian cannot go through
with "the odious deal." The colonels have even compounded the lie by writing in the official report that
Yossarian has been stabbed while heroically saving his colonels from a Nazi spy. Yossarian's "moral
principle" which Colonel Korn has scorned interferes: "`Let them send me home because I flew more than
fifty missions,' Yossarian said, `and not because I was stabbed by that girl, or because I've turned into
such a stubborn son of a bitch.'"
But by now he is trapped: as Major Danby explains, "`If you don't go through with the deal, they're going
to institute court-martial proceedings as soon as you sign out of the hospital.'" If he goes through with the
deal, he violates his moral principle, dupes his country, and betrays his fellows. If he refuses and is
court-martialed, he risks becoming another Billy Budd, whom Captain Vere martyred to preserve
discipline. For if Yossarian is found innocent, "`Other men would probably refuse to fly missions, too ...
and the military efficiency of the unit might be destroyed. So in that way,'" Major Danby concludes, "`it
would be for the good of the country to have you found guilty and put in prison, even though you are
innocent.'"
Here, Heller is carefully plotting, ethically walking the thin line between anarchy and individualism, and even
doing so conservatively. Yossarian is in an absurd dilemma; he is faced with preposterous alternatives.
Given such a situation, he invents a compromise: he does not want "to destroy the military efficiency of the
unit"; neither does he want to be the pampered bellwether of the colonels' flock. So he says, "`I can run
away.... Desert. Take off. I can turn my back on the whole damned mess and start running.'" Even before
he hears that Orr has arrived in Sweden, Yossarian has decided to light out for the Territory. Orr's escape
merely injects more hope into him.
Yet it is no life of ease Yossarian seeks in Sweden now, as he once has yearned for. Before things come
to a crisis, Sweden has represented Elysium to him: Yossarian "would certainly have preferred Sweden,
where the level of intelligence was high and where he could swim nude with beautiful girls with low
demurring voices." But Sweden then "was out of reach," and at the story's close it may still be. Though the
movie makes Yossarian ridiculous, rowing hopelessly away in his tiny raft for Sweden, the novel's
Yossarian is more realistic:
"`You'll never get there,'" Major Danby warns. "`You can't run away to Sweden. You can't even row.
"'But I can get to Rome,'" Yossarian says, "`if you'll keep your mouth shut when you leave here and give
me a chance to catch a ride.'"
Rather than swimming nude with beautiful girls, Yossarian's goal is more spartan now, to live accordingly
to his "moral principle" or "responsibilities"--to march not in Scheisskopf's parade nor in Cathcart's and
Korn's, but to the beat of his own drummer--specifically, at first, to rescue Nately's whore's kid sister from
the hell of "The Eternal City" and save her life by taking her with him to Sweden.
He has chosen the harder way. Although he refuses the martyrdom of a court-martial, he has also
renounced the free trip home to a hero's welcome. "`Your conscience will never let you rest,'" Danby
warns, but Yossarian laughs: "`God bless it.... I wouldn't want to live without strong misgivings.'" Yossarian
has not bought a ticket to safety, either. The last time we see him, that latter-day fury Nately's whore
slashes out at him. "The knife came down, missing him by inches."
"He took off," therefore, running not away from but toward his own honor. Like many in American fiction
before him, by rebelling, he denies himself the easy, comfortable way. When I asked Heller if he was
conscious of this radical tradition of renunciation, he replied in a letter dated February 8, 1971:
I conceived the ending to my book first and wrote the book; and it was only in the years
since that I dwelled upon it as being in an old tradition of alienation and renunciation. To the
protagonists you mention [see above, Huck, Hester, Ike, etc]. can be added Ahab, Bartleby,
Hightower (again Faulkner), to name a few.
The difference, though, is that Yossarian does not make good his escape, but only tries, and
that this attempt is illegal and turns him into a fugitive, thereby instituting a struggle between
him and the authorities in the environment he repudiates. It may have been an easy way out
for me, but definitely not for him, who could have more safely and comfortably accepted the
offer of the Colonels to turn him into a hero and send him home. My purpose was to raise a
question rather than answer one; his action institutes a conflict rather than evades one. And if
his mood is one of elation at the end, it is mainly because he has moved off dead center finally
and begun to act for himself.
Yossarian, marching backwards by himself and then renouncing a hero's comfortable role, is our clearest
dramatization of Thoreau's man who steps to the beat of a different drummer. In Heller's intention,
Yossarian is not copping out, is not taking the easy way, but rather "moved off dead center finally." And in
his peculiar world of horror and absurdity, he is ironically a "traditional" American rebel, like so many other
cultural mavericks who have made their separate, principled peace.
Source: Walter R. McDonald, "He Took Off: Yossarian and the Different Drummer," in The CEA
Critic, Vol. 36, No. 1, November, 1973, pp. 14-16. Reprinted in Novels for Students, Vol. 1.
Source Database: Literature Resource Center