Catch-22: Chapter 12 Summary & Analysis

Only one officer is required to spark a panic. Heller appears to be sending up the tendency for information in wartime to become exaggerated. Wars operate on rumor and misinformation, especially regarding enemy tactics. Meanwhile, Yossarian and his friends just want to live.

Yossarian doesn’t mind that this is “magical thinking”—an assumption that changing a symbol for the US line might change the actual line in combat. He figures that, if it distracts the higher-ups for long, it delays the Bologna campaign and extends his life that many days.

Black does not refer to any actual intelligence to check this “line movement.” Cathcart and Korn, characteristically, have little idea of the enemy’s activity. The army believes its own information and itself, and never checks itself or thinks critically about nearly anything.

It is typical, in jest, to state that one is really unwilling to do something by saying, “not for all the tea in China.” Milo’s actual purchase of all the Egypt in cotton is a literalization of what is meant to be taken only as humor.

Wintergreen’s assertion that it is Yossarian’s duty to die is of course incorrect—he is supposed to be part of the fight to defeat fascism. And yet the novel suggests, through the incompetent, venal, and yet all-powerful bureaucracy that in fact it is each individual soldier’s duty to die, however the army tells him to. Clevinger still has an idealistic belief in the wisdom of the higher-ups, but Yossarian has lost any such trust.

Yossarian’s statement here is remarkable, and is perfectly logical. It also recasts war as a battle against the individual soldier, in which both the enemy and the soldier’s own army are trying to get him killed. And, at the most basic level, there is truth to such an assertion, especially if the commanding officers are petty and selfish.

Like the movement of the battle line on the map, Yossarian’s “glue gun” rumor is believed naively by the military brass. This is only more evidence to show that the officers on Pianosa have a tenuous grasp of real war-time conditions.

In war, many dangerous activities seem quite a bit less dangerous when compared to the terror of flying combat missions. Yossarian does not seem too concerned about getting into a car at night with a very inebriated driver.

Clevinger acts as the voice of reason in this instance. After his chastening run in with military authority during boot camp, he appears more willing to follow orders, now, on Pianosa. Meanwhile, they have just escaped death in the jeep accident only to face it again on the Bologna run.

A comic scene. If Hungry Joe is afraid of the cat, Yossarian’s (joking) reasoning goes, then he should fight the cat fair and square. But the cat is, naturally, a “scaredy cat”—he runs away. Yossarian, too, mostly wants to avoid a fight with the enemy in the skies.