| Summary: | Critical writing on Catch-22 has often centred (quite naturally and understandably, it must be said) on concepts such as paradox, black humour and the absurdity of the human condition. Although these approaches have certainly not been without profit and have produced interesting readings, they have also tended to obscure, under the generic nature of such frameworks, the novel's patent political concerns - concerns which, moreover, are not at all unrelated to the usual critical preoccupations. In a similar way, although Catch-22 criticism has often relied heavily on the detection of literary allusions and influences at work in the text, a most obvious source of influence seems to have been generally ignored. This essay attempts to offer a different reading of Catch-22 based on the assertion that what the novel is really about is 'totalitarianism'. Its starting point is, therefore, a parallel reading bringing together Heller's best-known book with one of the central literary texts on 'totalitarianism' - George Orwell's 1984. Focusing initially on the similar way(s) in which the two novels construct what is called a 'totalitarian' atmosphere, the essay proceeds to briefly demonstrate the bearing of the 'totalitarian' problematic on another important '60s novel, E. L. Doctorow's Welcome to Hard Times, and to offer a fuller reading of Catch-22, including a summary excursion into the difficult question of how the student of '60s American fictions should approach the concept of 'totalitarianism'.
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