Joseph Heller’s Black Humor Creation from the Perspective of Catch-22*

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.191217.249How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Joseph Heller, black humor, absurd

Abstract

Catch-22 is the war-themed novels representative work of Heller, and is also a realistic black humorous novel created by Heller under the influence of American civilian life in the 1950s. The novel takes the war as the background to describe the scene of war through the perspective of a small potato, and reveals the decadent bureaucracy of the United States and the chaos of the whole social political and economic order. Heller wrote the absurdity into the novel from a multi-dimensional perspective, breaking the single narrative mode and language mode of the traditional novel. The novel uses a great deal of contradictory juxtaposition and ambiguous witty language to juxtapose unconnected things caused by unruly “military regulations”, so that the authenticity of the novel gives way to fiction and the plot gives way to language. The language of the novel has become the dominance of the novel world, which makes this anti-war novel have more thought-provoking artistic effect and anti-traditional color than the traditional war-theme novel. It highlights the concern of Heller for human survival and the digestion of the western traditional tragic model.

Copyright

© 2020, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Chengxiao Xiao
PY  - 2020
DA  - 2020/02/14
TI  - Joseph Heller’s Black Humor Creation from the Perspective of Catch-22*
BT  - Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Education, Language, Art and Inter-cultural Communication (ICELAIC 2019)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 829
EP  - 831
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.191217.249
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.191217.249
ID  - Xiao2020
ER  -