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Personification
Definition of Setting
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or it can be an imagined... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the... read full definition
Setting
Explanation and Analysis:
Much of Catch-22 takes place on Pianosa, a small island off the west coast of Italy in the Mediterranean Sea. It is in the Tuscan Archipelago, near the larger island of Elba, about 50 miles from the mainland. In real life, the island is only about four square miles, with no permanent settlements. Heller noted in the book's foreword that his version of Pianosa is much too small to accommodate everything that happens in the book. He acknowledges that the book contains an entirely fictionalized version of the island.
Heller's Pianosa also has a small village of Italian citizens, which was his invention: only 10 or so people live there at any given time, and there are no permanent settlements or modern infrastructure. The real island was also never used as an American air force base during World War II, but it was captured by the German army in 1943 and attacked by French soldiers in 1944, before being returned to Italy after the war. Heller's own experience of the war is similar to the one described in the book: he was stationed as a pilot on Corsica, the French island, further west than Pianosa. From there, he conducted bombing raids over Italy, much like the company stationed on Pianosa.
Outside of Pianosa, there are flashbacks to training sessions in Colorado and California. More specifically, the novel is set in large part in the hospital building within the company's camp, as well as the individual tents of the soldiers and officers.
Temporally, the novel is set in a fictionalized version of World War II. The main events take place from about 1942 to 1944. The book begins in 1944 with Yossarian in his hospital bed, and much of the main narrative of the book takes place at that time. This reflects Heller's experience with the war; he was deployed from 1942 to 1944. There are also flashbacks to events before the war and earlier within it, amid the book's irregular timeline. Despite this timing, though, the book is inflected with cultural and societal connections to the 1950s. Heller, who did not finish the novel until 1961, also sought to satirize the post-war attitude of optimism and possibility in America. He uses some specific references to cultural artifacts of the 1950s, like loyalty oaths and IBM computers. He quotes the CEO of General Motors during a hearing in 1953, who was characteristic of the big business so fundamental to that era. Heller's satire of the war effort has survived, as well, to be popular among the anti-war movement during both Vietnam and Iraq in later decades.
