During war, men and women are overwhelmed by emotions that make it difficult to overlook their war experiences. Jack Croasdile, a prisoner of war, drew during his captivity by the Germans in 1941 a picture titled Anticipating 1942. In the photo, he and his late wife are covered in a shadow with their heads resting on each other and their backs turned to the image, the figures looking towards the fireplace. His illustration represents his corner of paradise in a grotesque war where he feels the warmth and love of his better half; like many other soldiers, he longs for love in war. In war, men and women are tormented by the fear of dying, of being alone, forgotten, and find comfort in bed with a stranger to release repressed emotions and achieve a brief moment of peace. These individuals try to keep their minds healthy with sex, and some pretend or delude themselves into falling in love. The emotions felt during the war can be narrowed down to a spectrum: lust will be on the far left, love will be in the center in balance, and hate will be on the far right. The love spectrum, as it will be defined later, defines love as a bond between a man and a woman that transcends sexual needs and emotional validation. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay In Catch-22, Joseph Heller exposes the emotions felt by men and women in wartime relationships that all have a place on the love spectrum helping to generally determine where the lines lie in wartime when it comes to lust, love and hate. On the far left of the love spectrum lies Yossarian and his relationship with Luciana and Nurse Duckett. Yossarian believes that in every sexual encounter he has, he will find some sort of inner peace. Yossarian can be compared to a drug addict. When he finds a woman who will have sex with him, he explodes in ecstasy and then descends into depression. Yossarian has never felt love for any woman. Like so many other young men in the military, he seeks out women in the name of sex. During his visit to Rome, Yossarian meets Luciana. She talks to him jokingly throughout their evening together: "Okay, I'll dance with you... But I won't let you sleep with me" (153). As Luciana plays with his lustful desires, he deludes himself into falling in love with her. Yossarian has had the brief moment of serenity he feels after sex and since he has managed to free his feelings and make them almost impalpable, he impulsively wants to always have that impalpability and decides to marry Luciana. This is the ecstasy he feels after sex. Luciana rejects him and leaves him and he doesn't care until “suddenly he finds himself surrounded by images of Luciana undressing and putting on clothes and fondling and haranguing him stormily in the pink rayon shirt she wore in bed with him. and would never take off” (163). He sinks into depression after Luciana leaves him and misses her terribly. Yet, the same thing can be said to happen to him when he later meets Nurse Duckett. As Yossarian lies next to her on the beach, the author unmasks Yossarian's feelings: “[he derives] comfort and sedation from her closeness. He [has] a mad desire to always touch her, to always remain in physical communication” (335) and then the author goes on to the next page stating, “on the evenings when Yossarian felt horny he would take Nurse Duckett to the beach with two covered and he liked making love to her more than he sometimes liked making love to all the lusty, naked amoral girls in Rome” (336). The author mocks Yossarian's lust for women. He uses sexual language and describes Yossarian fornication with other womenas an act of lovemaking. Nurse Duckett as Luciana is another drug for Yossarian. When he is near her, he feels safe and succumbs to the extreme high he loves. But when she leaves him, and when Yossarian returns to Rome, Yossarian plunges back into depression over losing Nurse Duckett: “Despair gnawed at him. Visions assailed him. He wanted Nurse Duckett with her dress hiked up and her skinny thighs exposed to her hips” (351). Yossarian has extreme highs and lows when it comes to love. It creates instability in his life by placing him on the far left because until he learns to be with a woman to cultivate a relationship, he will always seek sex. Even so, Yossarian is hopeless when it comes to women, but he likes the idea of falling in love because it's the only comfort he can allow himself to dream in a desolate place where he knows everyone wants to kill him. the lustful side of the love spectrum is the chaplain and his wife. The chaplain writes letters to his wife to maintain a bond with her. Many men at war do this to remind themselves of what they are fighting for: the lover they left at home. «The chaplain loved his wife and children with such an indomitable intensity that he often wanted to prostrate himself helplessly and cry like a shipwrecked cripple» (271): some may consider this humbling for one's loved ones a sure sign of devotion, yet one must consider that type of characteristics the Chaplain possesses. The chaplain is a weak-hearted man who never asserts himself and hides to avoid any confrontation from his superiors. The chaplain humiliates himself only out of self-pity. The chaplain's love for his wife may be belied by his irrational fear that his wife will be "raped and killed repeatedly as soon as [a man] pushes her into a deserted sandpit" (271). Most men at war dream, like prisoner of war Jack Croasdile, of being at home with their wives; however, the chaplain prefers to dream that his wife is raped and killed. The chaplain's reveries cannot be contested as concern for his wife because they indicate a repressed desire to get rid of why he is fighting in the war. The chaplain's selfish daydreams do not cease. The Chaplain's lustful aspect shines through when he dreams of the inevitable “reunions with [his wife] that [end] in explicit acts of lovemaking” (271). The chaplain not only dreams madly of his wife being ravaged by other men, but he also dreams of her being ravaged by him. The chaplain never dreams of being at home with his wife whispering “I love you” as if they were the last words he could say to her. Instead, the chaplain becomes insecure about the love he has for his wife and doubts the love she has for him. She wonders, “There [are] so many other men…who might prove more satisfying to her sexually” (377). This type of insecurity has no place in true love. When two people love each other, they know that they will always be faithful to each other, thus transcending physical validation. The fact that Chaplain doubts his wife's faithfulness shows and feels that she only wants to feel pleasure shows that he thinks that love is only based on sex. Almost at balance, but still on the lust side of the love spectrum is Nately and the love he feels for his whore. . Their entire relationship mocks the idea of first love. Nately has never been in love and decides to fall madly in love with a whore when he could have another woman. Rich Nately wins the love of this greedy whore almost like in a fairy tale, but instead of winning her love with true love's first kiss, he wins her by letting her sleep. But why does Nately fall so desperately in love with her? Because he "[so earnestly tries to]capture the attention of the bored, phlegmatic girl with whom he has fallen so intensely in love and [try to] win her admiration forever" (244)? She is Nately's first love and he is hers. The truth is that young they are always the most in love with their first loves, just look at Romeo and Juliet he strives to win her affection because he feels he needs her to validate him to make him feel complete as a man balance in the love spectrum because she loves him back. When she finally gets “a good night's sleep,” she invites Nately to sit in her bed: “The girl smiled happily when she opened her eyes and saw him, and then, languidly stretching out her eyes. her long legs under the rustling sheets, she invited him to bed next to her with that look of simpering idiocy of a woman in heat” (356). Even if it is superficial that a good night's sleep pushed her to return his love , it should still be considered love. Overall, the love created here was proliferated by sex and yet developed over time. Love is not spontaneous; it takes time to grow and develop into a meaningful bond, which Nately's prostitute proves to have happened when she goes mad after swallowing the news of Nately's death: "when [Yossarian] broke the news to Nately's prostitute in Rome, he gave a piercing, heart-breaking scream and tried to stab him to death with a potato peeler” (392) If Nately had not died, the love the two began to cultivate might have actually become true love, but considering that the love has blossomed sexually and just blossomed emotionally, it will certainly be determined as something close to love After lust, the descent into hatred occurs a strong right to reach extreme hatred exemplified by Aarfy because he not only rapes and kills one. innocent woman, but admits to forcing multiple women to have sex with him and takes advantage of women he deems weak and useless. In Aarfy's case it would be appropriate to isolate him and refrain from identifying him in a relationship with any woman. Aarfy's slogan is “no one has to pay for good old Aarfy. I can get whatever I want whenever I want. I'm just not in the mood right now” (241). Aarfy is a troubled man. Aarfy enjoys having sex with women he deems unworthy of other men. Aarfy is a bully and like a bully he feels unloved and takes out his anger on women making them feel unloved. He represents men at war who cannot feel love because the atrocities of war deem them unlovable. The more a man kills, the more a man lives in misery, the more a man sees less and less of human kindness, the more a man will hate himself and hate everyone else. Even Aarfy's concept of love shows that he knows little about it, as the author explains: "Aarfy was an authority on true love because he had already truly fallen in love with Nately's father and with the prospect of working for him after war in some executive capacity as a reward for befriending Nately” (288). they remember that he is dirty and spiteful: "She had sallow skin and short-sighted eyes, and none of the men had ever slept with her because none of the men had ever wanted to, none except Aarfy, who had raped her once that same evening and then he had held her captive until the civil curfew sirens sounded and it was illegal for her to be outside. Then he threw her out the window” (417). He killed her because he thought she deserved to die, just as he believes he deserved to die. Aarfy hates life because every time he flieshe leads men into enemy fire which could be his attempt at redemption by dying in war. Aarfy hates himself and hates the people he tries to love. Therefore, he pretends to love himself on the surface and care about the well-being of good girls. He is the demoralized soldier who no longer cares what is right or wrong, he does what he wants because he can and doesn't know what else to do. Since he cannot love himself, no one can therefore love him. The war has transformed him into a beast that devours the lives of the innocent and pure to validate his own worth. Next, near the far right of the love spectrum, the analysis of the relationship between Doc Daneeka and Mrs. Daneeka must be examined. . The relationship between Doc Daneeka and Mrs. Daneeka has gone awry due to miscommunication, but leaves the reader wondering if Mrs. Daneeka left Doc Daneeka in the dust on purpose to profit from her insurance policies. In any case, Mrs. Daneeka can be justified in saying that she loves her husband and therefore the relationship they share can be placed somewhere close to love and close to hate because she betrayed Doctor Daneeka by abandoning him in his time of need. Mrs. Daneeka, upon learning that her husband had died, weeps for him and "shares the peace of the peaceful Staten Island night with painful cries of lament" (341). Mrs. Daneeka has the appropriate response that every wife should have when she learns that her husband died in the line of duty. She plays a convincing role as a grieving wife until her husband lets her know that he is not dead and she refuses to believe him: "[the letter's] style resembled that of her husband and the melancholic, self-pitying tone was familiar, though darker than her husband's." usual" (342). She knew her intuition told her he was alive and she was ready to act to save him until she received payments from her husband's insurance claims. Mrs. Daneeka embodies the stereotypical materialistic wartime woman who wants to buy elegant clothes. As she became rich and popular, “her closest friends' husbands began to flirt with her. [She] was delighted with how things were going and had her hair dyed” (343). Maybe Heller was saying that we tend to marry people who are exactly like us or that love can never trump money? Or maybe he's saying that women will willingly abandon their men for money? In this case, Mrs. Daneeka seems to be greedily taking advantage of her husband's misery when Dr. Daneeka told her through letters that he was still alive, "it was he, her husband, Dr. Daneeka who begged her, and not a corpse or some impostor” (344). This is why their relationship is on the right side of the love spectrum because she may have loved him in the beginning, but eventually she stopped loving him. She abandoned her husband in her time of need money. If the purest love is devotion, then the most corrupt love is abandonment. The love they had was such that it could not defy the boundaries of war or money, and left Mrs. Daneeka rich and the her greedy husband alone and forgotten. Next, the right of the love spectrum approaches two relationships in which women are considered sexual objects and are neglected; however, to distort any confusion, even though Yossarian and Chaplain also considered women objects sexual, they treated their women with a certain level of dignity. To summarize, the first relationship is between Lieutenant Scheisskopf and his wife. If there was ever love between them, their love faded because of the war. Lieutenant Scheisskopf fell in love with his parades and his wife fell in love with her husband's men. Lieutenant Scheisskopf is awar fanatic and a workaholic. He lives and breathes saves because perhaps like in sport he doesn't have to think or feel anything, he just has to do it instinctively. The author describes Lieutenant Scheisskopf's feelings towards his wife: “It was the desperation of Lieutenant Scheisskopf's life to be chained to a woman unable to look beyond his own dirty sexual desires and look at the titanic struggles for the unattainable in which a nobleman man could become heroically committed” (73). Lieutenant Scheisskopf represents men who feel they can win the love and admiration of their wife by gaining the recognition and influence of a higher power: i.e. government, church, corporations. Unfortunately for Lieutenant Scheisskopf, he and his wife don't get along. His wife feels burdened by a sexually repressed husband because she says, "My husband has a whole squadron full of air force cadets who would be only too happy to cohabit with their commanding officer's wife just for the extra stimulation it would give them." " (178) . Lieutenant Scheisskopf's wife embodies the image of the neglected wife who must seek her husband's attention in the form of bad behavior. By stooping to behave as if he were a sexual object towards Lieutenant Scheisskopf, he can benefit. His efforts are futile because his demand for attention causes Lieutenant Scheisskopf to sink deeper into his work. The two represent love that dies and love that transforms into tolerance of the other. The second relationship involves General Dreedle and the nurse. General Dreedle is a reckless man who doesn't care about anyone but himself, except for his daughter. General Dreedle uses his nurse only as a sexual object. It could be compared to that of a sex slave or a dog: “General Dreedle's nurse always followed General Dreedle wherever he went” (219). Whether she represents the women of the time who followed men without question or she represents the dumb blonde stereotype, she symbolizes the woman that almost every man desires. General Dreedle admits to his compatriots: "You should see her naked... Al Wing has a uniform in my room made of purple silk that is so tight that her nipples stand out like cherries... Some nights I make her wear it when I'm there. It's Moodus." just to drive him crazy” (216). General Dreedle uses her to drive his sexually repressed son-in-law, Colonel Moodus, crazy. General Dreedle is her nurse's boss because he tells her what to wear and who to seduce. It represents insensitive men who treat women only as objects who must adhere to their will. They represent the type of relationship where there is no emotion, only physical. In any case, balance is finally approaching, the part where true love is achieved. Ironically placed at the beginning of the novel, a brief glimpse into the story of a lover who transcends the sexual needs and emotional validation that other characters in the novel feel they need to feel complete. Of course, what would become of us if not a splinter? could people really fall in love in wartime? Devastatingly, romantic films like Casablanca would crumble. The author tells the story of the end of a love story between a man and a woman in hospital; the white hospital, which represents hope, new beginnings and security. In the man's last months, the woman spends her time whispering softly in his ear and caring for him at his bedside. If he were to die, his precious face would be the last image that flashes before his eyes. The two are described in hospital: "in a bed in the small private section at the end of the ward, still working incessantly behind the green plywood partition, there was the solemn.
tags