Major Major Major Major

Who Is Major Major Major Major?

Major Major Major Major was promoted to the rank of Major by an IBM computer processing his enlistment records, which recognized his name as a rank and acted accordingly. His full legal name is Major Major Major Major. His father, a man described as having a “sly impassive wit,” named him this because it amused him. The IBM machine completed the symmetry. He was Major Major before he became Major Major.

He is one of the strangest and most poignant characters in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22: a man whose entire existence is structured by a joke he did not make and cannot escape. He looks like Henry Fonda, which people mention to him constantly. He is painfully shy. He was socially isolated his entire childhood because his father required him to do as much work as the farmhands and he was therefore too tired to play with other children. He has never been able to fit in, never been able to be liked, and then the Army made him a Major and now no one will talk to him because he outranks them and they do not know how.

Psychology and Personality

Major Major is the novel’s most thorough portrait of passive suffering. He does not rage. He does not scheme. He responds to his impossible situation with an increasingly elaborate system of avoidance: he will only see visitors in his office when he is not in his office, and he ensures he is never in his office when visitors are present by jumping out the window when they arrive.

This is comic, but it is also genuinely sad. Major Major has learned that social contact produces pain and that avoidance is the only protection available to someone in his position. He did not want to be a major. He did not want authority. Authority was assigned to him the way his name was assigned to him and his social isolation was assigned to him: by forces external to himself, for reasons that had nothing to do with who he actually is.

He is gentle, earnest, and deeply uncomfortable. He signs Washington Irving’s name to official documents because it gives him something to enjoy while making a small rebellion against a system that has never consulted him about anything. When the CID men come to investigate the Washington Irving signatures and interrogate him, he begins signing Irving Washington instead, escalating not out of defiance but out of a kind of dazed inability to resist small acts of chaos.

He lacks the capacity for cruelty that most of the authority figures around him possess. He also lacks the capacity to use his authority to help anyone. He is perfectly trapped.

Character Arc

Major Major does not arc so much as calcify. Each attempt to establish normal human contact backfires, and each backfire produces a new layer of avoidance. By the time Yossarian finally manages to talk to him (by crawling under the tent while Major Major is eating alone), Major Major is so startled and so unpracticed at conversation that the exchange is nearly incoherent.

He tells Yossarian, in this rare moment of actual communication, to come and see him whenever he is not there. It is the novel’s most perfectly condensed statement of his condition. He is available for human contact under the condition that makes human contact impossible.

His trajectory ends in complete administrative isolation. He has the form of authority and none of the content. He commands without being consulted. He signs without reading. He is, in some ways, the most honest picture of bureaucratic rank in the novel: power that does nothing, assigned to someone who wanted nothing, who uses it only to hide.

Key Relationships

His father is the origin point of his damage. The man with the “sly impassive wit” who named his son Major Major Major Major and worked him so hard he could not make friends and generally treated the boy as an object of private amusement. Major Major emerged from childhood with no social skills and a name that is a punchline.

Yossarian manages the only real conversation Major Major has in the novel, and it consists largely of Major Major explaining the terms under which future conversations can happen, which are terms that prevent future conversations from happening. There is real sympathy between them, but neither has the tools to act on it.

The CID men are a particularly cruel joke on Major Major, who is being investigated for something he did as a small rebellion, something harmless, in a war full of genuine atrocities that no one investigates.

What to Talk About with Major Major Major Major

Talking to Major Major on Novelium requires patience, because he is not practiced at being talked to. He will warm up slowly. He is not unfriendly. He is simply so conditioned to avoidance that genuine exchange takes some time to establish.

Ask him how it felt the day he was promoted. He was not consulted. He woke up as a different rank. Ask him what he thought the IBM machine had seen in him.

Ask him about his father. He may deflect, but the question matters, because his father is the original author of his condition, the first person to treat him as material for someone else’s joke.

Ask him why he signs documents as Washington Irving. It started as something small. What did it feel like, that small act of being someone other than who he is?

Ask him if he has ever had a friend. The answer is more complicated than yes or no.

Why Major Major Major Major Changes Readers

Major Major is Heller’s comedy of identity at its most pure and its most melancholy. The joke of his name points at something real: the way bureaucratic systems assign identities to people without consulting them, the way institutional rank becomes confused with the person who holds it, and the way someone can be trapped by a series of accidents that converge into a life they never wanted.

He is also, in a novel full of men trying desperately to be seen and feared and admired, the only character who wants the opposite. He wants to be left alone in a system that will not leave him alone precisely because of who he accidentally is. There is a specific loneliness in that, which readers recognize even if they cannot name it: the loneliness of being defined by something you did not choose and cannot change.

Famous Quotes

“Sergeant, from now on I don’t want anyone to come in and see me while I’m here.”

“You can come and see me any time I’m not here.”

(His response to being asked if he is Major Major: a long, uncomfortable pause.)