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毕业设计（论文）
题
目：
学
院：
专业
班级：
指导教师：
学生姓名：
学
号：
从黑色幽默的角度分析《第二十二条军规》
An Analysis of the Catch-22 from the
Perspective of
Black Humor
人文社会科学学院
英语
07
级
2
班
职称：
讲
师
407070
i
从黑色幽默的角度分析《第二十二条军规》
摘
要
《第二
十二条军规》
是当代美国作家约瑟夫﹒海勒的讽刺小说，
被认为
是黑
色幽默的代表作。
该作品发表后，
黑色幽默这股文学浪潮才得以兴起。
这部小说
主要取材于约瑟夫
﹒海勒在空军服役期间的经历，
讲述了一个喧闹，
荒诞，
富有
讽刺意味同时又荡气回肠的战争故事。
该
小说以二战后期为创作背景，
以黑色幽
默的角度表现了战争的愚
蠢，
以一种极致的荒谬而不是对于痛苦和血腥场面的图
解般描写
的方式揭示了武装冲突的恐怖和毫无意义。
本文阐述了黑色幽
默的特点以及黑色幽默的影响，
对
《第二十二条军规》
做
了大概描述，并从人物塑造，语言使用，社会环境，结构特点四方面以
黑色幽默
的视角阐明了世界的荒诞性，
旨在为更好的理解该文学
作品和黑色幽默的精髓提
供启迪。
关键词：
《第二十二条军规》
，黑色幽
默，荒诞，约瑟连
ii
An Analysis of the
Catch-22
from the
Perspective of Black Humor
Abstract
Catch-22
is
a
satirical
novel
by
the
contemporary
American
author
Joseph
Heller.
Since
its
publication,
the
literature
trend
toward
black
humor
becomes
prevalent.
The
novel
draws
heavily
on
his
air
force
experience
and
presents
a
war
story that is at once hilarious,
grotesque, cynical and stirring. The novel, set
during the
latter
stage
of
World
War
Ⅱ
,
presenting
the
horrible
meaninglessness
of
armed
conflicts through a kind of desperate
absurdity rather than through graphic depictions
of suffering and violence.
The
paper
is
going
to
talk
about
the
characteristics
of
black
humor
and
the
significances of black
humor. Then the author talks about the general
idea in Joseph
Heller’s
masterpieces
Catch-22
,
analyses the absurdity of world from
characterization,
language
use
and
society
involved
in
the
Catch-22
.
This
paper
aims
to
bring
enlightenment
to
the
comprehension
of
the
novel
and
understanding
of
the
black
humor.
Key Words
:
Catch-22
; black humor;
absurdity; Yossarian
iii
Table of contents
Ⅰ
. Introduction
.
.......................................
..................................................
....................
1
Ⅱ
.Literature Review.........
..................................................
...........................................
2
A. Black Humor
.......................................
..................................................
.............
2
1.
Characteristic of Black
Humor ............................................
.....................
2
2. Significance of Black Humor in
American Literature
.................................
3
B. The
Background of Black Humor and
Catch-22
...............................................
4
C. Joseph
Heller and His
Catch-22
.
...............................
.........................................
4
is of the Black
Humor in
Catch-22
from Four
Aspects
.
...................
.............
5
A. Characters..........................
..................................................
...............................
5
1.
Characteristics of Yossarian
..........
..................................................
.............
5
2. The Soldier in White
....
..................................................
..............................
7
3.
Characteristics of Milo
.
...
..................................................
...........................
8
B. Social
Circumstance
.
..............
..................................................
........................
1
0
1. The Impotence of Language ..........
..................................................
..........
1
0
2.
The Absolute Power of Bureaucracy ................
.........................................
11
of Religious Faith .....
..................................................
........................
11
C. Symbolic Meanings
.
.............................................
............................................
1
2
1.
Catch-22
.
.......
..................................................
...........................................
1
2
2. Aerial
Photographs
.
...............
..................................................
...................
1
3
3. Chocolate-Covered Cotton............
..................................................
...........
1
4
D.
Structural Feature
....................
..................................................
.......................
1
4
Ⅴ
.Conclusion ...............
..................................................
.............................................
1
5
Bibliography .
..................................................
..................................................
...........
1
7
iv
An Analysis
of the
Catch-22
from the
Perspective of Black Humor
Ⅰ
. Introduction
The
novel
of
absurd
can
be
explained
as
novel
of
black
humor.
Since
the
publication
of
Catch-22
,
the
literature
trend
toward
black
humor
became
prevalent.
The use of black
humor in
Catch-22
is a
perfect example of its very intention.
This paper is going to discuss Joseph
Heller’s
masterpiece
Catch-22
from
the
perspective
of
black
humor.
In
this
paper,
the
author
will
try
to
discuss
some
representative
characteristics,
social
circumstances,
symbolic
meanings
and
the
structure features. Making readers
clearer of the black humor and more familiar with
the novel of absurd which uses the
perspective of black humor to present the absurd
world. After the reader grasps its true
meaning, they could not help the bitter simile.
Catch-22
has
become
one
of
the
defying
novels
of
the
twentieth
century.
It
presents an utterly
unsentimental vision of war, stripping all
romantic pretenses away
from combat,
replacing visions of glory and honor with a kind
of night marsh comedy
of violence,
bureaucracy, and paradoxical madness.
Catch-22
relies heavily on
humor
to convey the insanity of war,
presenting the horrible meaningless of armed
conflict
through
a
kind
of
desperate
absurdity
rather
than
through
graphic
depictions
of
suffering and violence.
After
the
publication
of
Catch-22
that
Heller
as
a
specialized
writer
is
remembered by the world.
This work is called the epic in the 1960s. By
describing an
apparently
crazy
world,
he
exposes
the
corruption
of
American
society,
where
the
social
bureaucrats,
related
to
capital
power,
brought
suffering
and
death
to
the
ordinary people. Joseph
Heller put abnormal people and things as normal in
writing,
making so incredible things
reasonable so that all the normal things become
ridiculous
and the absurd world is full
of humor.
The novel
Catch-22
mainly tells a
story about a pilot soldier named Yossarian.
This story happens in the Word War
Ⅱ
. Serving in the army for a
long time, he gets
tired of it, and
wants to go back home away from the war and from
the threat to be
killed. After the
death of his friend’s
Snowden,
Yossarian begins to be grounded, to be
an ordinary person away from the cruel
world. In order to accomplish his dream, he
pretends
to
be
insane;
to
be
ill
and
even
behaves
in
insane
manners.
At
last
,
he
,
obeying his own authentic -self ,
refuses to work together with the upper official
and
deserts from the army, in doing so,
he turns back on the dehumanizing cold machinery
of the military
rejects the
rule of
Catch-22
, and
strives for
a
future in which his
in
control of his own life.
One
of the main goals of this paper is to satirize the
dehumanizing machinery of
the war by
showing the irremovable survival impulse at the
heart of every individual.
By
constantly
making
fun
of
wartime
situations
and
by
carrying
arguments
to
their
extreme,
absurd
conclusions.
The
paper
shows
the
absurd
of
the
world
with
black
humor.
Through
a
maze
of
characters
and
events.
This
paper
explores
war
and
bureaucracy and their effects on
ordinary people.
This paper aims at provoking the
readers’ response to the blackness of modern
life
as
laughter,
or,
laughing
in
face
of
a
tragic
situation.
Based
the
background
materials and
some other materials, this paper will try to do
some more research and
make readers
clearer with black humor in the
Catch-22
.
Ⅱ
.Literature Review
A. Black Humor
In
2004,
professors
You
Nanchun
and
Xu
Lehui,
who
taught
in
the
Liaoning
Normal University, published the
article named
“
The Study of
the Characteristics of
Black
Humor
”
in
the
Journal
of
Liaoning
Normal
University
.
In
this
article
which
introduced
the
black
humor,
in
literature,
drama,
and
film
used
to
express
the
absurdity in
sensitivity, paradox, and cruelty of the modern
world. Ordinary characters
or
situations are usually exaggerated far beyond the
limits of normal satire or irony.
Black
humor
uses
devices
often
associated
with
tragedy
and
is
sometimes
equated
with tragic farce. They discuss some
representative characteristics of the black humor
and the significance of black
humor.
1.
Characteristic of Black Humor
2
If
art
is
the
reflection
of
reality,
then
black
humor
novelists
firstly
find
out
formlessness and exaggeration in art.
Since the world is incomprehensible and absurd,
its presentation is certainly
illogical, irrational, like magnification of a
microscope, or
formlessness
technique
of
magical
mirror.
This
presents
to
us
the
abnormal
phenomenon
which
can
not
be
seen
in
normal
situation,
and
lead
to
the
effect
of
absurdity.
Another literary
technique that the black humor writers often use
is funny satire.
While presenting the
human in
ridiculous and strange
condition,
it narrative tone is
cold and indifferent, and even with
ridicule and mockery, with a tone of indifferent
seems like the description of an
antique. It is full of fun, ridicule and satire,
the writer
made a grotesque, horrible
joke, but it is also a provoking joke.
From
the
perspective
of
novel,
the
traditional
novel’s
continued
narrative
structure
disappeared
in
the
black
humor
writer’s
works.
Black
humor
writers
generally
followed
a
move
fragmented
structure,
often
wrote
the
novel
in
scattered
fragments.
Fragmentation
of
narrative
structure
and
collection
of
specimens
in
the
major feature of black humor writers’
works.
2
.
Significance
of Black Humor in American Literature
As everyone knows that social
consciousness reflects the social exists, the
novel
reflects the real world from some
perspectives. In the novel, the characters and
plots
are in chaotic, messy, crazy and
fragmented world.
In
twentieth
century,
robots
became
more
and
more
like
human,
but
some
people
became
more
and
more
like
robot.
From
this,
while
black
humor
writers
exposing the
absurdity and misery of life, the writers also
exposed the ever-changing
high-
tech’s dehumanization
of people with writer’s consideration of the
relationship
between the
high-
tech and human’s life. From this
perspective, the writers wanted to
arouse people’s awareness of the
ever
-changing high-tech.
In
the novel, the disaster of different characters
caused by the war can show the
protagonist’s
will
to
escape
from
war.
In
this
way,
the
writer’s
aim
of
protesting
against war through the description of
the disaster and absurdity of military group can
be shown in the novel. After reading
the story, readers will be disgusted with the war.
3
So the aim of
struggling against war can be achieved though the
reading and writing.
B. The
Background of Black Humor and
Catch-22
Since
the 1960s, it has been a disturbing time in
American social. People found
the
boundaries
between
fact
and
fiction
obscured
or
no
longer
existing.
This
is
a
period
of
changes
for
the
American
novel.
Traditional
realistic
narrative
techniques
were and changes
was inevitable inadequate and falsifying in
presenting life. It was
already
happening at that time. The 1960s and 1970s was a
period in which all people
had come to
sense that absurdity exists on all conceivable
levels of life, and it was the
“absurd”
novelists
who
d
iscovered
a
new
rhetoric
effective
enough
to
voice
that
feeling in
literature. The
novelist
of the absurd tends to
comically or exaggeratedly
imitate traditional novelistic devices.
They parody other novel other styles and forms
and take them with highly ambiguous
attitudes. They thought that truth and reality are
multiple difficult to capture, and
uncertain.
During
the
1960s
and
1970s,
it
was
those
decades
that
American
youth
truly
began
to question authority. Hippies, university
protests, and the civil right movement
all
marked
the
1960s
as
a
decade
of
revolution.
The
author
Zhao
Guofan
says
the
World War
Ⅱ
exerted great influence on black humor.
There was a study by
Gary
w
﹒
Davis, in a
de tailed summary of
Catch-22
; He criticized that
Catch-22
Joseph Heller
the idea that there is no single
definitive truth that the word is the form of a
continual
clash of truth. Heller
permeates his ideas of black humor throughout the
novel. Each
character lives within
his/her own world where each creates their
individual ideas of
right and wrong.
C. Joseph Heller and His
Catch-22
The
Professor
Timothy
Sexton,
who
taught
in
California,
published
Cach-22
and the Black Humor
which introduced
Catch-22
was inspired by Heller's own World
War II experience as a youthful
bombardier in the European theater.
Joseph Heller's novel
Catch-22
is satirical
masterpiece that has been enjoyed by
readers for decades. It was the first
novel to transform the World
War
Ⅱ
from a human
tragedy into an absurdist comedy and
proved that nothing is sacrosanct in literature.
The
novel
uses
satire
and
dark
humor
and
a
non-traditional
structure
to
keep
the
4
reader
off-balance
just
long
enough
for
Heller
to
unleash
his
more
serious
themes.
War must be the
ultimate absurdity of human existence. How else to
explain engaging
in
violence
repeatedly
and
consistently
throughout
millennia
in
attempt
to
impose
peace?
Catch-22
was
one
of
the
first
novels
to
portray
the
seriousness
of
war
as
a
comedy, albeit a comedy of
extraordinary darkness.
Indeed, there is too
much
peculiar beauty worth exploring in Heller’s
Catch-22.
And
the
most
fearful
beauty
of
Catch-22
lies
in
the
fact
that
the
author
seized
something
truly
profound
of
every
individual
with
his
incisive
insight;
and
that
something if often deliberately
constrained and concealed in real life. However,
Heller
found the best break though
point-black humor plus a war setting. No other
choices
can better reflect the
spiritual perplexities of American people in 1960s
than them. Of
cause what else is worth
mention is that the insanity and absurdity of
human society
shown in the book is not
the patent of war setting, it might extent to a
peaceful time.
So when the book is
closed, who dares to say that he had never
experienced the pain
of “ignorant
armies clash by night”?
The primary weapon that Joseph Heller
uses to explode his satirical bombs in
Catch-22
is black humor.
Black humor has been defined by French surrealist
Andre
Breton
as
a
“lampooning
of
social
conventions
and
a
profound
disrespect
for
the
nobility of literature.
is of the Black Humor in
Catch-22
from Four Aspects
A. Characters
1.
Characteristics of Yossarian
Yossarian’s story forms the core of the
novel, so most events is refracted though
his point of view. Yossarian takes the
whole war personally, rather than being swayed
by national ideals or abstract
principles.
Yossarian is
furious that his life is constant danger through
no fault of his own.
He has a strong
desire to live and determined to be immoral or die
trying. As a result,
he spends a great
deal of his time in the hospital, faking various
illnesses in order to
avoid the war.
The novel draws to a close as
Yossarian, troubled by
N
ately’s death,
refuses
to
fly
any
more
missions.
He
wonders
the
streets
of
Rome
without
5
encountering every possible kind of
human horror-form rapes disease, murder. He is
eventually
arrested
for
being
in
Rome
without
a
pass,
and
his
superior
officers,
Colonel
Cathcart
and
Colonel
Koran,
offer
him
a
choice;
he
can
either
face
a
court-martial
or
be
released
and
sent
home
with
and
honorable
discharge.
There
is
only one
condition: in order to be released, he must
approve of Cathcart and Korn and
state
his support for their policy, which requires all
the men in the 5 quadroon to fly
eighty
missions. Although he is tempted by the offer,
Yossarian realizes that to comply
would
be
to
endanger
the
live
of
other
innocent
men;
he
chooses
another
way
out,
deciding to desert the army and flee to
neutral Sweden. In doing so, he turns his back
on the dehumanizing cold machinery of
the military, rejects the rule of
Catch-22,
and
strives for a future in which he is in
control of his own life.
Generally speaking, Yossarian is a hero
of black humor. He is utterly a ware of
his
situation.
Not
only
dose
he
not
go
a
long
with
evil
trend,
but
also
not
belittle
himself. At last he chooses to desert.
It is a method of taking his life back into his
own
hand.
Yossarian’s
choice
informs
that
whenever
we
make
a
choice,
we
must
be
responsible
not
only
for
ourselves,
but
for
the
others.
Yossarian,
living
in
all
unfavorable circumstance, he resists
the irrationality in an absurd way. He shows us
his brevity by saying “no” to
the
Catch-22, a
nd it is a
“no” to the absurd world.
Yossarian,
the
protagonist
of
Catch-22
,
is
both
a
member
of
the
squadron
’
s
community and alienated by it. Although
he flies and lives with the men, he is marked
as an outsider by the fact that many of
men think he is insane. Even his Assyrian name
is
unusual;
no
one
has
ever
heard
it
before.
His
different
from
the
rest
of
the
men
leads us to expect something
exceptional from Yossarian.
But
Yossarian
’
s characteristics
are not those of typical hero. He does not risk
his
life to save others; in fact, his
primary goal throughout the novel is to avoid
risking
his life whenever possible. But
the system of values around Yossarian is so skewed
that this approach seems to be the only
truly moral stance he can take, if only because
it is so logical. What we come to hate
about military bureaucracy as we read
Catch-22
is again for
reasons that are utterly illogical and
unimportant.
Out of this sea of ant
logic, Yossarian is able to seize and
hold onto one true, logical idea- that he should
try
6
to
preserve life. Unlike a conventional hero,
however, Yossarian does not generalize
this idea to mean that he should risk
his own life in attempts to save everybody
else
’
s.
In
a
world
where
life
itself
is
so
undervalued
and
so
casually
lost,
it
is
possible
to
redefine heroism as simple self-
preservation.
This
insistence
on
self
–
preservation
creates
a
conflict
for
Yossarian.
Even
though he is determined to save his own
life at all costs, he nonetheless cares deeply
for the other members of his squadron
and is traumatized by their deaths. His ongoing
horror
at
Snowden
’
s
death
stems
both
from
his
pity
for
Snowden
and
from
his
horrified realization that his own body
is just as destructible as
Snowden
’
s. In the end,
when offered a choice between his own
safety and the safety of the entire squadron,
Yossarian
is
unable
to
choose
himself
over
others.
This
concern
creates
its
own
Catch-22
: life is not worth
living without moral concern for the well-being of
others,
but
a
moral
concern
for
the
well-being
of
others
endangers
one
’
s
life.
Yossarian
ultimately escapes this conundrum by
literally walking away from the war- an action
that
refuse
both
the
possibility
of
becoming
an
officer
who
avoids
danger
at
the
expense
of
his
troops
and
that
of
remaining
at
soldier
who
risks
his
life
for
meaningless reasons.
What’s
more, the naming of
Yossarian is also
very classic. Yossarian is so afraid
of
death,
but
he
himself
mentioned
that
he
was
one
of
the
already
extinguished
Assyrian, not to mention the closeness
in spelling and sound between Yossarian and
Assyrian. Readers can easily perceive
the irony
implied in this naming. And
his pet
name,
Yo-Yo,
in
another
sense,
is
a
round-shaped
toy
made
from
wood
or
plastic,
which is nevertheless controlled by a
thin rope. No matter how far the Yo-Yo leaves
the palm, it’ll return the along the
rope in the end. So
Yo-Yo here
subconsciously has
hinted Yossarian’s
fate. This is only one example of the author’s
skill full playing with
black humor.
2. The Soldier in White
In
the
Catch-22
Heller’s
accurate
and
detailed
description
of
a
soldier
as
the
following
“the sold
ier in white was encased from
head to toe in plaster and gauze. He
had two useless legs and two useless
arms”. Another passage shows this: “sewn into
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