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Stream of Consciousness
Style
Explanation and Analysis:
The most conspicuous part of Joseph Heller's very peculiar style is his love of paradoxes. Throughout the book, Heller often describes and defines ideas that turn back logically on themselves; or depicts a character feeling two contradictory feelings at the same time; or subverts readers' expectations on multiple levels. Heller's use of paradox, oxymoron, irony, and other such contradictions is fundamental to how he depicts his strange world in prose.
Heller also uses particularly long sentences, complex in prose and with intricate vocabulary. This contrasts with his rather gruff and commonplace dialogue between the (usually rather stupid) soldiers and officers. The narrator, in stylistic contrast, comes off as rather erudite compared to the brawny soldiers.
Above the sentence level, the book is split into 42 chapters, usually titled with the name of a character, who is usually the subject of that chapter. However, often, the chapters only nominally focus on their title character and instead tell some other, self-contained story. The book is also written with an irregular timeline. There are extended flashbacks to certain battles and past events, and the same events in the narrative are often shown multiple times from different characters' perspectives. Generally, the chapters are often quite unrelated to each other, telling (or often repeating) stories from various perspectives, loosely held together by the overarching mystery of Snowden, and by Yossarian's growing obsession and hatred for Catch-22.
While the irregular timeline makes the novel seem rather random, there is a rigorous system of free association which connects each passing chapter to the next. In other words, the first sentence of a chapter usually is related to the last sentence of the previous chapter, even if the chapters as a whole are unrelated. For instance, Chapter 3 ends with Havermeyer calling Hungry Joe "crazy," and Chapter 4 begins "Hungry Joe was crazy, and no one knew it better than Yossarian, who did everything he could to help him." In such a structurally complex novel, these surface-level choices to connect the chapters together serve to stylistically emphasize the irregular timeline.
