![]() ![]() ![]() Mussolini is still in power in the novel, so its time frame must be 1943. ![]() (I’ve just done a new introduction to the 50 th-anniversary edition of William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which sensitized me to the chronology of the war.) There is no mention of Normandy in the novel, the Herman Goering Division is still a force to be reckoned with, even the Italian campaign was not a done deal. And re-examining the book opened the door to a new way of looking at Catch-22, one that saw it as even more profound.įirst the factual background: If you examine the state of the war at the time when the novel is set more closely, you have to concede the war wasn’t “over,” in the sense of having been definitively won. But after a while, probably after the time I spent writing Explaining Hitler, I began to rethink that defense, and to find it deficient. I was satisfied with that for a while, and I kept on rereading Catch-22 with even more defiant pleasure. The people who defended Heller, Yossarian, and Catch-22 from critiques like Podhoretz’s tended to say, Well, the war was just about all over! Already won! The missions were hardly even necessary the commanders were foolishly and unnecessarily condemning the fliers to death by ordering extra missions. ![]()
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