Catch 22

Posted on April 7, 2003 in Culture

Catch 22 has become a phrase that most people use as a synonym for a dilemna, but that isn’t how author Joseph Heller employed the term in the novel that spawned the phrase.

Throughout the book, Catch 22 gets invoked as a nonexistent rule that allows Yossarian’s various antagonists to get away with all kinds of illegal and immoral trickery and skullduggery. I think that the last time the term appears in the novel we get to the real meaning: “Catch 22 means that they can do anything that we can’t stop them from doing.”

This isn’t dilemna: this is despair.