"Catch-22": Winning With Words

On Joseph Heller's chaotic comedy, "Catch-22", and how language can be a cage or a key.

“It was love at first sight.
The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.”

So opens Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, with a declaration of love that ultimately goes nowhere and has, seemingly, nothing to do with anything. The fact that these are the first lines of the novel imbues the announcement with no small amount of significance — yet it’s never brought up again.

Perhaps Heller is making fun of how we bestow meaning on that which we assume ought to have meaning, things like the opening lines in a novel. So much is made of the first words an author places on the page that you’d think any good novel is, in its value, weighted as 60% opening lines and 30% the final words, while everything in between is filler.

It’s not only the placement of these lines at the start of the novel that tricks the reader into believing these words are lifting more weight than they are. The romantic mind assumes that the announcement of a pending passion is intended to set up some great…