Yossarian

Who Is Yossarian?

John Yossarian is a U.S. Army Air Forces bombardier stationed on the fictional island of Pianosa near Italy during World War II, and he is completely, entirely, justifiably terrified. Not of dying in combat in the abstract, but of being killed by the specific war he is in right now, by the specific people who keep raising the mission count every time he gets close to the number required to go home.

Yossarian is the hero of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, and his heroism consists almost entirely of trying very hard not to die. This makes him one of the most honest protagonists in American literature. He is an Assyrian-American bombardier who has decided, with perfect rational clarity, that the people running this war are trying to kill him. Not metaphorically. The Colonel keeps raising the required number of missions. That is an attempt on his life. Yossarian responds accordingly.

He is funny, selfish, warm, terrified, and one of the very few sane characters in the novel. The book’s central joke is that being sane in this system makes you look insane.

Psychology and Personality

Yossarian operates on a simple, unassailable logic: he wants to live, and the war is trying to prevent that. Everything he does flows from this premise. He fakes illnesses to stay in the hospital. He moves the bomb line on a map to abort a mission. He refuses to fly. He witnesses Snowden dying in the back of a plane, intestines spilling out onto the floor, and concludes that man is matter and matter can be destroyed and he is not going to let that happen to him.

What makes him psychologically interesting is that his self-preservation instinct coexists with genuine moral feeling. He is not simply a coward. He is disturbed by the deaths around him in ways that the other characters are not. When Snowden dies, it haunts him across the entire novel, appearing in fragments, never fully told until the end, because Yossarian cannot bring himself to complete the memory. When Kid Sampson and McWatt die in a grotesque accident, Yossarian is devastated. He cares about people. He just also refuses to die for a system run by Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Korn.

His selfishness is real, but it is the selfishness of someone who has correctly assessed their situation. Everyone around him has agreed to pretend that the rules make sense. Yossarian refuses, and the novel treats his refusal as the only reasonable response available.

Character Arc

The novel’s structure is deliberately non-linear, looping back over the same events from different angles, mirroring the way Yossarian himself keeps circling around the worst memory (Snowden in the plane) without being able to look at it directly.

His arc, such as it is, moves from creative avoidance toward genuine moral choice. Early Yossarian tries to escape through systems: faking illness, working the bureaucracy, finding loopholes. Later Yossarian, especially in the harrowing night walk through Rome near the novel’s end, confronts something he cannot scheme his way out of. The violence and suffering he witnesses are not puzzles to be solved. They are the reality that all the absurdist humor has been holding at arm’s length.

The ending, in which he decides to desert to Sweden rather than take the corrupt deal Cathcart and Korn offer, is Yossarian’s first genuine moral act. Running away, but running in the right direction and for the right reasons, refusing to be complicit in a system that will use him as cover for its own crimes.

Key Relationships

Snowden is the dead man whose secret Yossarian cannot forget. They are barely friends in the story. But Snowden’s death, and what Yossarian sees when he opens Snowden’s flight suit, reshapes everything. The revelation, man is matter, spirit is nothing the institutions care about, haunts the novel’s structure and Yossarian’s psychology alike.

Dunbar is his closest friend, the one who stretches time by being miserable. Dunbar’s logic (boredom makes time pass slowly, so boredom extends your life) is a perfect comic mirror of Yossarian’s logic. Both are trying to survive using opposite methods.

The Chaplain (Tappman) is the person Yossarian is most genuinely kind to. He sees the Chaplain’s goodness and likes him for it, which is unusual for a character as self-interested as Yossarian.

Nately’s whore haunts the second half of the novel. She blames Yossarian for Nately’s death and keeps trying to stab him. It is played for dark comedy, but she also represents the real consequences of the war on real people, the kind of consequence the military bureaucracy never tallies.

What to Talk About with Yossarian

On Novelium, talking to Yossarian is like talking to someone who has stripped away every polite fiction about institutions and duty and come out the other side with a very simple position: he would like not to be killed, thank you.

Ask him to explain Catch-22 in his own words. He has thought about it a lot. Ask him whether he thinks running to Sweden was brave or cowardly. He has a real answer, not a comfortable one.

Push him on Snowden. He may not want to go there, but if you get him talking, he will tell you what he saw and what it meant. Ask him whether he thinks Clevinger was wrong to believe in the war. Clevinger is dead now, and Yossarian misses him.

Ask him whether he trusts anyone. Ask him what sanity looks like from the inside, when everyone around you is calling you crazy for refusing to fly into flak for a colonel who just wants a medal.

Why Yossarian Changes Readers

Yossarian is one of those characters who rearranges something in how you look at authority. He is not an anarchist or a philosopher. He is a man who keeps asking the obvious question that everyone around him has agreed not to ask: why is the person in charge of my life allowed to be this incompetent and this venal?

Catch-22 came out in 1961 and readers immediately recognized something that had nothing to do with World War II. Yossarian’s predicament, trapped by a system that uses your compliance to destroy you, applies to corporations, governments, universities, hospitals, and most hierarchies most people inhabit. His response, refusal, at great personal cost, is not presented as triumphant. It is presented as the only option left when the alternative is death by bureaucracy.

Readers laugh reading Catch-22, and then they realize they are not quite sure what they are laughing at.

Famous Quotes

“Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.”

“He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt.”

“It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice.”

“They’re trying to kill me. I don’t know why, but I just know it, they’re out to get me.”