Today he is a promotion man busily engaged in the circulation wars of women's magazines. From 1942 to 1945 he served as a combat bombardier in the Twelfth Air Force and was stationed on the Island of Corsica. That experience provided only the jumping-off place for this novel. But most of Mr. Heller's story rises above mere realism and soars into the stratosphere of satire, grotesque exaggeration, fantasy, farce and sheer lunacy. Its humor, I think, is essentially masculine.
Few women are likely to enjoy it.
One can relish his delirious dialogue and his ludicrous situations while recognizing that they reflect a basic range and disgust. His story is a satirical denunciation of war and of mankind that glorifies war and wages war cruelly, stupidly, selfishly. Yossarian's predicaments and disasters at his squadron's base upon the Island of Pianosa and his amorous diversions in Rome provide the principal narrative. Yossarian was brave once. Unfortunately, the colonel, who wanted to be a general, kept raising the number of compulsory missions.