Catch-22, A Challenged Book

“Catch-22”, by Joseph Heller, should be a challenged book because it uses sexual explicitness and graphic violence, but discusses the controversial topic of war to draw readers out of their comfort zone. The sexual explicitness is shown when Yossarian meets with his whore while on shore leave, the violence becomes too graphic while the death of Snowden is being retold, and the topic of war pushes readers out of their comfort zone when the narrator describes the condition of the war outside of Pianosa.

“Catch-22” should be challenged because it very graphically describes Snowden’s mortal injury, showing extreme violence. Late in the novel, after several instances of extreme violence, the graphicness comes to a climax. Yossarian is in the hospital and has a flashback to the death of Snowden. Yossarian tries to help Snowden when he notices that “Snowden was wounded inside his flak suit. Yossarian ripped open the snaps of Snowden’s flak suit and felt himself scream wildly as Snowden’s insides slithered down to the floor in a soggy pile and just kept dripping out. A chunk of flak more than three inches big had shot into his other side just underneath the arm and blasted all the way through, drawing whole mottled quarts of Snowden along with it through the gigantic hole in his ribs it made as it blasted out” (Heller, 439). Heller’s novel hits the peak of graphic violence late in the book as “a chunk of flak three inches big” shoots into Yossarian’s airplane and into Snowden, ripping a “gigantic hole in his ribs” and in doing so “drawing whole mottled quarts of Snowden along with it”, painting the awful picture of a very real injury during World War II and dealing death so violently to a fictitious human being. The picture gets worse for Snowden as his “insides slithered down to the floor”, creating an awful image. The passage continues on, becoming unnecessarily violent as details “just kept dribbling out” along with Snowden’s insides. The nasty picture was described by a third person view of Yossarian, the man helping to treat Snowden’s injury in the plane. The graphic violence becomes personal by describing that Yossarian “felt himself scream wildly” when he saw the injury, putting a personal touch on seeing the picture from a reader’s view. That single passage takes the horrible injury and the rest of the novel to a degree of graphicness unfit to be read without discussion.