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Genre
Explanation and Analysis:
In genre, Catch-22 is part of a not-so-small category of novels about World War II, which can be considered a genre unto themselves. After the war, many novelists, poets, and other writers sought to render it in literature, and their works tended to have similar features: a focus on the absurd and evil ideology of the war; a discussion of global superpowers and their militaries, especially the U.S. (as in this novel) and the U.S.S.R.; and a focus on the social and cultural movements of the late 40s and 50s, after the war.
While World War I ushered in Modernist literature, known for its sparse prose and earnest characters, World War II was received by a new movement of post-modernist literature, full of complex structures, irregular narrators and perspectives, and a disillusioned outlook. Catch-22, a fundamental novel in this post-modern movement, inspired a whole category of complex, interwoven, satirical novels about the war, especially those with unusual chronologies, including the classics Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut and Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon.
Catch-22 is also part of a larger literary and philosophical movement called absurdism. Associated most widely with the French philosopher Albert Camus, absurdists held that the universe is fundamentally illogical and lacks innate meaning. Heller holds with this belief: his novel is full of paradoxes and contradictions, creating a world in which nothing is logical whatsoever. Heller uses absurdism to mount a satirical critique of the war effort during World War II. He describes the military leadership as fundamentally illogical, arguing that the war and everyone participating in it was absurd.
Catch-22 is, also, a novel with an antihero, going through episodic trials and travails, meeting with many characters. In this way it is a very classic novel, hearkening back to fundamental works like Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe. So while Heller's work was part of a groundbreaking new movement in its chronology and subject, it was also connected to the long history of the novel form in its characters and overall structure.
