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Sample # 3
Characters Compared to Real Events and people
This paper
examines the relation between the characters in the two novels Catch
– 22, by Joseph Heller and Invisible Man by Ralph Waldo Ellison to
real life characters and situations. Although neither is a real life
story, they could both just as well be. Both novels of American
Literature each a masterpiece in its own right, could be depictions
of real life events. Catch – 22, with its emphasis and focus on war
and the reality not the romanticism attributed to it; and Invisible
man, with it emphasis on racism, and how society generally treats
African Americans and would like them to be invisible.
Joseph Heller was
born in
Brooklyn in 1923. He served as an Air Force bombardier in World War II, and has
enjoyed a long career as a writer and a teacher. His best-selling
books include Something Happened, Good as Gold, Picture This, God
Knows, and Closing Time—but his first novel, Catch-22, remains his
most famous and acclaimed work. Written while Heller worked
producing ad copy for a
New York City
marketing firm, Catch-22 draws heavily on Heller’s Air Force
experience, and presents a war story that is at once hilarious,
grotesque, bitterly cynical, and utterly stirring. The novel
generated a great deal of controversy upon its publication; critics
tended either to adore it or despise it, and those who hated it did
so for the same reason as the critics who loved it. Over time,
Catch-22 has become one of the defining novels of the twentieth
century. It presents an utterly unsentimental vision of war,
stripping all romantic pretenses away from combat, replacing visions
of glory and honor with a kind of nightmarish comedy of violence,
bureaucracy, and paradoxical madness The
combat experiences of Heller gave him the background for his
fictional airman, Yossarian, the existential hero and moral center
of Heller's fierce satirical depiction of army life. The
title of this brilliant satire, in which the real enemy appears to
be the commanding officers rather than the opposing army, has passed
into the language. With sinister logic, Yossarian, who is trying to
get himself removed from action on the grounds of insanity, is told
that only madmen want to fly missions, and the fact that he wants to
be grounded proves that he is sane, and therefore fit to fly. A
Catch-22 situation describes any similar no-win argument.
Catch-22 also
distinguishes itself from other anti-romantic war novels by its core
values: Yossarian’s story is ultimately not one of despair, but one
of hope; the positive urge to live and to be free can redeem the
individual from the dehumanizing machinery of war. Yossarian is the
protagonist and hero of the novel. He is a captain in the Air Force
and a lead bombardier in his squadron, but he hates the war. His
powerful desire to live has led him to the conclusion that millions
of people are trying to kill him, and he has decided either to live
forever or, ironically, die trying. The character and his actions
and the way he deals with events, could be very easily comparable to
an officer in reality faced with the same situations.
Another character
in the novel, one with a more antagonistic orientation is Colonel
Cathcart. He is the ambitious, unintelligent colonel in charge of
Yossarian’s squadron. Colonel Cathcart wants to be a general, and he
tries to impress his superiors by bravely volunteering his men for
dangerous combat duty whenever he gets the chance. He continually
raises the number of combat missions required of the men before they
can be sent home. Colonel Cathcart tries to scheme his way ahead; he
thinks of successful actions as “feathers in his cap” and
unsuccessful ones as “black eyes.” Although this is not the kind of
man, who would generally be found in real life, his ambition though
is one that most commanding officers can identify with. In Heller’s
experience with the forces, he must have come across many a number
of commanding officers who aspired to be Generals. Some may have
even schemed, to make themselves look better and superior to others
in another squadron. Again the character portrayal by Heller is very
realistic and the character can be compared very realistically with
a real life person in the same position.
Ralph Waldo
Ellison, was born in 1914 and died in 1994. He was an American
writer and educator, born in
Oklahoma City,
and educated at Tuskegee Institute. His best-known work,
Invisible Man (1952), expounds the theme that American society
willfully ignores blacks. The novel, one of the first works to
describe modern racial problems in the United States from a
black-American point of view, received the National Book Award for
fiction in 1953. reflects a deep and abiding interest in freedom.
The novel specifically examines the limitations placed on the
personal freedom of black Americans and strategies of resistance to
these limitations.
Ellison
gracefully weaves together several extended metaphors of
invisibility, blindness, and enslavement throughout the novel. His
training as a jazz musician surfaces in the intricate, nuanced
developments of these metaphors. The rich symbolism of Invisible Man
demonstrates Ellison’s effort to never allow his reader to decide on
one meaning for a particular symbol. Instead, he presents dozens of
possible meanings, each one harmonizing with the rest.
The book is
written as a narrative that does not disclose the identity of the
narrator, and keeps him nameless throughout the novel. The narrator
is the central character in the novel. He searches for the freedom
to define his own identity. His invisibility is both an advantage
and a disadvantage, and the absence of his name becomes a metaphor
for the ambivalent nature of invisibility. He struggles with the
imprisoning effects of overt and implicit racism throughout his
search for personal freedom. He embodies both Everyman and No man.
He is in fact a signifier of a Black man trying to search for a
place in today’s society. A man trying to survive and man trying to
overcome the grounding realities and pitfalls of racism. He is in
fact every real Black man.
The other
character although not very integral to the plot itself is one that
has depicted the face of general society. Emerson - Emerson is the
son of one of the college’s wealthy, white trustees. And although
he expresses sympathy for the narrator, and his plight but he
remains too pre-occupied with his own problems to really help the
narrator. That is n fact the portrayal of the general sympathizers
of African Americans. Although there are many even in the society
that refuses to accept them, the sympathizers, have no time and
neither the inclination to try to help a black man in finding his
own place. They are just too caught up in their own lives. This is a
character that is very reflective of an entire body of people.
Nameless and faceless as they are, they have the one advantage in
their favor that makes them sympathizers – they are white.
The two novels discussed above although as mentioned
earlier in the paper are not real life stories, but their themes and
their characters are very real, and may not be directly based on
factual characters, present enough of a generalized and focused
plight of their circumstances that the could have been developed and
drawn from real people.
Bibliography
1.
Heller, Joseph, Encarta Encyclopedia 1998
2.
Ellison,
Ralph Waldo, Encarta Encyclopedia 1998
3.
Author
Unavailable, Racism in American Literature, American Literary
Journal, October 1998
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