American Literature books summary

and tries to understand what happened that led her to Willie. When they

were children, Jack spent most of his time with Adam Stanton, and Anne

simply tagged along. But the summer after his junior year at the State

University, when he was twenty-one and Anne was seventeen, Jack fell in

love with Anne, and spent the summer with her. They played tennis together,

and swam together at night, and pursued an increasingly intense physical

relationship-- Jack remembers that Anne was not prudish, that she seemed to

regard her body as something they both possessed, and that they had to

explore together. Two nights before Anne was scheduled to leave for her

boarding school, they found themselves alone in Jack's house during a

thunderstorm, and nearly made love for the first time--but Jack hesitated,

and then his mother came home early, ending their chance. The next day Jack

tried to convince Anne to marry him, but she demurred, saying that she

loved him, but seemed to feel that something in his unambitious character

was an impediment to her giving in to her love. After Anne left for school,

they continued to write every day, but their feelings dwindled, and the

next few times they saw each other, things were difierent between them.

Over Christmas, Anne wouldn't let Jack make love to her, and they had a

fight about it. Eventually the letters stopped, and Jack got thrown out of

law school, and began to study history, and then eventually he was married

to Lois, a beautiful sexpot whose friends he despised and who did not

interest him as a person. Toward the end of their marriage, he entered into

a phase of the Great Sleep, and then left her altogether.

After two years at a very refined women's college in Virginia, Anne

returned to Burden's Landing to care for her ailing father. She was engaged

several times but never married, and after her father died, she became an

old maid, though she kept her looks and her charm. She devoted herself to

her work at the orphanage and her other charities. Jack feels as though she

could never marry him because of some essential confidence he lacked, and

that she was drawn to Willie Stark because he possessed that confidence.

Jack also feels that because he revealed to Anne the truth of her father's

duplicity in protecting Judge Irwin after he accepted the bribe, he is

responsible for Anne's afiair with Willie. But he tries to convince himself

that the only human motivation is a certain kind of biological compulsion,

a kind of itch in the blood, and that therefore, he is not responsible for

Anne's behavior.

He says this attitude was a "dream" that made his trip west deliver on its

promise of "innocence and a new start"--if he was able to believe the

dream.

Chapter 8 Summary

Jack drives eastward back to his life. He stops at a filling station in New

Mexico, where he picks up an old man heading back to Arkansas. (The old man

was driven to leave for California by the Dust Bowl, but discovered that

California was no better than his home.) The old man has a facial twitch,

of which he seems entirely unaware. Jack, thinking about the twitch,

decides that it is a metaphor for the randomness and causelessness of life--

the very ideas he had been soothing himself with in California, ideas which

excused him from responsibility for Willie and Anne's afiair--and begins to

refer to the process of life as the "Great Twitch."

Feeling detached from the rest of the world because of his new "secret

knowledge," as he calls the idea of the Great Twitch, Jack visits Willie

and resumes his normal life. He sees Adam a few times and goes to watch him

perform a prefrontal lobotomy on a schizophrenic patient, which seems to

him another manifestation of the Great Twitch. One night, Anne calls Jack,

and he meets her at an all-night drugstore; she tells him that a man named

Hubert Coffee tried to offer Adam a bribe to throw the building contract

for the new hospital to Gummy Larson. In a rage, Adam hit the man, threw

himout, and wrote a letter resigning from his post as director of the

hospital.

Anne asks Jack to convince Adam to change his mind; Jack says that he will

try, but that Adam is acting irrationally, and therefore may not listen to

reason. He says he will tell Willie to bring charges against Hubert Coffee

for the attempted bribe, which will convince Adam that Willie is not

corrupt, at least when it comes to the hospital. Anne offers to testify,

but Jack dissuades her--if she did testify, he says, her afiair with Willie

would become agrantly and unpleasantly public. Jack asks Anne why she has

given herself to Willie, and Anne replies that she loves Willie, and that

she will marry him after he is elected to the Senate next year.

Willie agrees to bring the charges against Coffee, and Jack is able to

persuade Adam to remain director of the hospital. That crisis is

averted,but a more serious crisis arises when a man named Marvin Frey--a

man, not coincidentally, from MacMurfee's district--accuses Tom Stark of

having impregnated his daughter Sibyl. Then one of MacMurfee's men visits

Willie and says that Marvin Frey wants Tom to marry his daughter--but that

Frey will see reason if, say, Willie were to let MacMurfee win the Senate

seat next year. Willie delays his answer, hoping to come up with a better

solution.

In the meantime, Jack goes to visit Lucy Stark at her sister's poultry

farm, where he explains to her what has happened with Tom. Lucy is

crestfallen, and says that Sibyl Frey's child is innocent of evil and

innocent of politics, and deserves to be cared for.

Willie comes up with a shrewd solution for dealing with MacMurfee and Frey.

Remembering that MacMurfee owes most of his current political clout, such

as it is, to the fact that Judge Irwin supports him, Willie asks Jack if he

was able to discover anything sordid in Judge Irwin's past. Jack says that

he was, but he refuses to tell Willie what it is until he gives Judge Irwin

the opportunity to look at the evidence and answer for himself.

Jack travels to Burden's Landing, where he goes for a swim and watches a

young couple playing tennis, feeling a lump in his throat at his memories

of Anne. He then goes to visit the judge, who is happy to see Jack, and who

apologizes for being so angry the last time they spoke. Jack tells the

judge what MacMurfee is trying to do and asks him to call MacMurfee off.

The judge says that he refuses to become mixed up in the matter, and Jack

is forced to ask him about the bribe and Mortimer Littlepaugh's suicide.

The judge admits that he did take the bribe, and accepts responsibility for

his actions, saying that he also did some good in his life. He refuses to

give in to the blackmail attempt.

Jack goes back to his mother's house, where he hears a scream from

upstairs. Running upstairs, he finds his mother sobbing insensibly, the

phone receiver off the hook and on the oor. When she sees Jack she cries

out that Jack has killed Judge Irwin--whom she refers to as Jack's father.

Jack learns that Judge Irwin has committed suicide, by shooting himself in

the heart, at the same moment he learns that Judge Irwin, and not the

Scholarly Attorney, was his real father. Jack realizes that the Scholarly

Attorney must have left Jack's mother when he learned of her afiair with

the judge. In a way, Jack is glad to be unburdened of his father's

weakness, which he felt as a curse, and is even glad to have traded a weak

father for a strong one. But he remembers his father giving him a chocolate

when he was a child, and says that he was not sure how he felt.

Jack goes back to the capital, where he learns the next day that he was

Judge Irwin's sole heir. He has inherited the very estate that the judge

took the bribe in order to save. The situation seems so crazily logical--

Judge Irwin takes the bribe in order to save the estate, then fathers Jack,

who tries to blackmail his father with information about the bribe, which

causes Judge Irwin to commit suicide, which causes Jack to inherit the

estate; had Judge Irwin not taken the bribe, Jack would have had nothing to

inherit, and had Jack not tried to blackmail Judge Irwin, the judge would

not have killed himself, and Jack would not have inherited the estate when

he did--so crazily logical that Jack bursts out laughing. But before long

he is sobbing and saying "the poor old bugger" over and over again. Jack

says this is like the ice breaking up after a long, cold winter.

Chapter 9 Summary

Jack goes to visit Willie, who asks him about Judge Irwin's death. Jack

tells the Boss that he will no longer have anything to do with blackmail,

even on MacMurfee, and he is set to work on a tax bill. Over the next few

weeks, Tom continues to shine at his football games, but the Sibyl Frey

incident has left Willie irritable and dour as he tries to concoct a plan

for dealing with MacMurfee. In the end, Willie is forced to give the

hospital contract to Gummy Larson, who can control MacMurfee, who can call

off Marvin Frey. Jack goes to the Governor's Mansion the night the deal is

made, and finds Willie a drunken wreck; Willie insults and threatens Gummy

Larson, and throws a drink in Tiny Dufiy's face. Tom continues to spiral

out of control. He gets in a fight with some yokels at a bar, and is

suspended for the game against Georgia, which the team loses. Two games

later, Tom is injured in the game against Tech, and is carried off the

field unconscious. Willie watches the rest of the game, which State wins

easily, then goes to the hospital to check on Tom. Jack goes back to the

offce, where he finds Sadie Burke sitting alone in the dark, apparently

very upset. Sadie leaves when Jack tells her about Tom's injury, then calls

from the hospital to tell Jack to come over right away.

Jack goes to the hospital, where the Boss sends him to pick up Lucy. Jack

does so, and upon their arrival they learn that the specialist Adam Stanton

called in to look at Tom has been held up by fog in Baltimore. Willie is

frantic, but eventually the specialist arrives. His diagnosis matches

Adam's: Tom has fractured two vertebrae, and the two doctors recommend a

risky surgery to see if the damage can be repaired. They undertake the

surgery, and Willie, Jack, and Lucy wait. Willie tells Lucy that he plans

to name the hospital after Tom, but Lucy says that things like that don't

matter. At six o'clock in the morning, Adam returns, and tells the group

that Tom will live, but that his spinal cord is crushed, and he will be

paralyzed for the rest of his life. Lucy takes Willie home, and Jack calls

Anne with the news. The operation was accomplished just before dawn on

Sunday. On Monday, Jack sees the piles of telegrams that have come into the

offce from political allies and well-wishers, and talks to the obsequious

Tiny. When Willie comes in, he declares to Tiny that he is canceling Gummy

Larson's contract. He implies that he plans to change the way things are

done at the capital. Jack is taking some tax-bill figures to the Senate

when he learns that Sadie has just stormed out of the offce, and receives

word that Anne has just called with an urgent message.

Jack goes to see Anne, who says that Adam has learned about her

relationship with Willie, and believes the afiair to be the reason he was

given the directorship of the hospital. She tells Jack that Willie has

broken off the afiair because he plans to go back to his wife. She asks

Jack to find Adam and tell him that that isn't the way things happened.

Jack spends the day trying to track down Adam, but he fails to find him.

That night, Jack is paged to go to the Capitol, where the vote on the tax

bill is taking place. Here, Jack greets Sugar-Boy and watches the Boss talk

to his political hangers-on. The Boss tells Jack that he wants to tell him

something. As they walk across the lobby, they see a rain-and-mud-soaked

Adam Stanton leaning against the pedestal of a statue. Willie reaches out

his hand to shake Adam's; in a blur, Adam draws a gun and shoots Willie,

then is shot himself by Sugar-Boy and a highway patrolman. Jack runs to

Adam, who is already dead.

Willie survives for a few days, and at first the prognosis from the

hospital is that he will recover. But then he catches an infection, and

Jack realizes that he is going to die. Just before the end, he summons Jack

to his hospital bed, where he says over and over again that everything

could have been difierent.

After he dies, he is given a massive funeral. Jack says that the other

funeral he went to that week was quite difierent: it was Adam Stanton's

funeral at Burden's Landing.

Chapter 10 Summary

After Adam's funeral and Willie's funeral, Jack spends some time in

Burden's Landing, spending his days quietly with Anne. They never discuss

Willie's death or Adam's death; instead they sit wordlessly together, or

Jack reads aloud from a book. Then one day Jack begins to wonder how Adam

learned about Anne and Willie's afiair. He asks her, but she says she does

not know-- a man called and told him, but she does not know who it was.

Jack goes to visit Sadie Burke in the sanitarium where she has gone to

recover her nerves. She tells Jack that Tiny Dufiy (now the governor of the

state) was the man who called Adam; and she confesses that Tiny learned

about the afiair from her. She was so angry about Willie leaving her to go

back to Lucy that she told Tiny out of revenge, knowing that, by doing so,

she was all but guaranteeing Willie's death. Jack blames Tiny rather than

Sadie, and Sadie agrees to make a statement which Jack can use to bring

about Tiny's downfall.

A week later, Dufiy summons Jack to see him. He offers Jack his job back,

with a substantial raise over Jack's already substantial income. Jack

refuses, and tells Tiny he knows about his role in Willie's death. Tiny is

stunned, and frightened, and when Jack leaves he feels heroic. But his

feeling of moral heroism quickly dissolves into an acidic bitterness,

because he realizes he is trying to make Tiny the sole villain as a way of

denying his own share of responsibility. Jack withdraws into numbness, not

even opening a letter from Anne when he receives it. He receives a letter

from Sadie with her statement, saying that she is moving away and that she

hopes Jack will let matters drop--Tiny has no chance to win the next

gubernatorial election anyway, and if Jack pursues the matter Anne's name

will be dragged through the mud. But Jack had already decided not to pursue

it.

At the library Jack sees Sugar-Boy, and asks him what he would do if he

learned that there was a man besides Adam who was responsible for Willie's

death. Sugar-Boy says he would kill him, and Jack nearly tells him about

Tiny's role. But he decides not to at the last second, and instead tells

Sugar-Boy that it was a joke. Jack also goes to see Lucy, who has adopted

Sibyl Frey's child, which she believes is Tom's. She tells Jack that Tom

died of pneumonia shortly after the accident, and that the baby is the only

thing that enabled her to live. She also tells him that she believes--and

has to believe--that Willie was a great man. Jack says that he also

believes it.

Jack goes to visit his mother at Burden's Landing, where he learns that she

is leaving Theodore Murrell, the Young Executive. He is surprised to learn

that she is doing so because she loved Judge Irwin all along. This

knowledge changes Jack's long-held impression of his mother as a woman

without a heart, and helps to shatter his belief in the Great Twitch. At

the train station, he lies to his mother, and tells her that Judge Irwin

killed himself not because of anything that Jack did, but because of his

failing health. He thinks of this lie as his last gift to her.

After his mother leaves, he goes to visit Anne, and tells her the truth

about his parentage. Eventually, he and Anne are married, and in the early

part of 1939, when Jack is writing his story, they are living in Judge

Irwin's house in Burden's Landing. The Scholarly Attorney, now frail and

dying, lives with them. Jack is working on a book about Cass Mastern, whom

he believes he can finally understand. After the old man dies and the book

is finished, Jack says, he and Anne will leave Burden's Landing--stepping

"out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time."

CATCH-22

(Joseph Heller)

SOME INFO ON JOSEPH HELLER

b. May 1, 1923, Brooklyn, N.Y., U.S.

American writer whose novel Catch-22 (1961) was one of the most

significant works of protest literature to appear after World War II. The

satirical novel was both a critical and a popular success, and a film

version appeared in 1970.Heller flew 60 combat missions as a bombardier

with the U.S. Air Force in Europe. He received an M.A. at Columbia

University in 1949 and was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Oxford

(1949-50). He taught English at Pennsylvania State University (1950-52) and

worked as an advertising copywriter for the magazines Time (1952-56) and

Look (1956-58) and as promotion manager for McCall's (1958-61), meanwhile

writing Catch-22 in his spare time. The plot of the novel centres on the

antihero Captain John Yossarian, stationed at an airstrip on a

Mediterranean island in World War II, and portrays his desperate attempts

to stay alive. The "catch" in Catch-22 involves a mysterious Air Force

regulation, which asserts that a man is considered insane if he willingly

continues to fly dangerous combat missions; but, if he makes the necessary

formal request to be relieved of such missions, the very act of making the

request proves that he is sane and therefore ineligible to be relieved. The

term Catch-22 thereafter entered the English language as a reference to a

proviso that trips one up no matter which way one turns.His later novels

including Something Happened (1974), an unrelievedly pessimistic novel,

Good as Gold (1979), a satire on life in Washington, D.C., and God Knows

(1984), a wry, contemporary-vernacular monologue in the voice of the

biblical King David, were less successful. Closing Time, a sequel to Catch-

22, appeared in 1994. Heller's dramatic work includes the play We Bombed in

New Haven (1968).

CONTEXT

Joseph Heller was born in Brooklyn in 1923. He served as an Air Force

bombardier in World War II, and has enjoyed a long career as a writer and a

teacher. His bestselling books include Something Happened, Good as Gold,

Picture This, God Knows, and Closing Time--but his first novel, Catch-22,

remains his most famous and acclaimed work.

Written while Heller worked producing ad copy for a New York City

marketing firm, Catch-22 draws heavily on Heller's Air Force experience,

and presents a war story that is at once hilarious, grotesque, bitterly

cynical, and utterly stirring. The novel generated a great deal of

controversy upon its publication; critics tended either to adore it or

despise it, and those who hated it did so for the same reason as the

critics who loved it. Over time, Catch-22 has become one of the defining

novels of the twentieth century. It presents an utterly unsentimental

vision of war, stripping all romantic pretense away from combat, replacing

visions of glory and honor with a kind of nightmarish comedy of violence,

bureaucracy, and paradoxical madness.

Unlike other anti-romantic war novels, such as Remarque's All Quiet on

the Western Front, Catch-22 relies heavily on humor to convey the insanity

of war, presenting the horrible meaninglessness of armed conflict through a

kind of desperate absurdity, rather than through graphic depictions of

suffering and violence. Catch-22 also distinguishes itself from other anti-

romantic war novels by its core values: Yossarian's story is ultimately not

one of despair, but one of hope; the positive urge to live and to be free

can redeem the individual from the dehumanizing machinery of war. The novel

is told as a disconnected series of loosely related, tangential stories in

no particular chronological order; the final narrative that emerges from

this structural tangle upholds the value of the individual in the face of

the impersonal, collective military mass; at every stage, it mocks

insincerity and hypocrisy even when they appear to be triumphant.

SUMMARY FOR "CATCH-22"

Chapters 1-5

Yossarian is in a military hospital in Italy with a liver condition

that isn't quite jaundice. He is not really even sick, but he prefers the

hospital to the war outside, so he pretends to have a pain in his liver.

The doctors are unable to prove him wrong, so they let him stay, perplexed

at his failure to develop jaundice. Yossarian shares the hospital ward with

his friend Dunbar; a bandaged, immobile man called the soldier in white;

and a pair of nurses Yossarian suspect hate him. One day an affable Texan

is brought into the ward, where he tries to convince the other patients

that "decent folk" should get extra votes. The Texan is so nice that

everyone hates him. A chaplain comes to see Yossarian, and although he

confuses the chaplain badly during their conversation, Yossarian is filled

with love for him. Less than ten days after the Texan is sent to the ward,

everyone but the soldier in white flees the ward, recovering from their

ailments and returning to active duty.

Outside the hospital there is a war going on, and millions of boys are

bombing each other to death. No one seems to have a problem with this

arrangement except Yossarian, who once argued with Clevinger, an officer in

his group, about the war. Yossarian claimed that everyone was trying to

kill him. Clevinger argued that no one was trying to kill Yossarian

personally, but Yossarian has no patience for Clevinger's talk of countries

and honor and insists that they are trying to kill him. After being

released from the hospital, Yossarian sees his roommate Orr and notices

that Clevinger is still missing. He remembers the last time he and

Clevinger called each other crazy, during a night at the officers' club

when Yossarian announced to everyone present that he was superhuman because

no one had managed to kill him yet. Yossarian is suspicious of everyone

when he gets out of the hospital; he has a meal in Milo's mess hall, then

talks to Doc Daneeka, who enrages Yossarian by telling him that Colonel

Cathcart has raised to fifty the number of missions required before a

soldier can be discharged. The previous number was forty-five. Yossarian

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