Catch-22 Isolation Quotes

How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Chapter.Paragraph)

Quote #13

With their heads down disconsolately, the chaplain, Major Major, and Major Danby moved toward their jeeps in an ostracized group, each holding himself friendlessly several feet away from the other two. (24.124)

Arguably, the three virtuous yet timid characters in the book are lonely men, each trapped in exile. The irony is that they are physically near one another in this scene. One can easily imagine them befriending each other to relieve their loneliness. But each is too timid to reach out to the others.

Quote #14

But the chaplain's impression of a prior meeting was of some occasion far more momentous and occult than that, of a significant encounter with Yossarian in some remote, submerged, and perhaps even entirely spiritual epoch in which he had made the identical, foredooming admission that there was nothing, absolutely nothing, he could do to help him. (25.4)

The chaplain's identity starts to merge with that of Major Major's, who refuses to help Yossarian in avoiding his missions. In a strange sense, they seem almost to share a common memory.

Quote #15

No one […] seemed really to appreciate that he, Chaplain Albert Taylor Tappman, was not just a chaplain, but a human being, that he could have a charming, passionate, pretty wife whom he loved almost insanely and three small blue-eyed children with strange, forgotten faces who would grow up someday to regard him as a freak and who might never forgive him for all the social embarrassment his vocation would eventually cause them. Why couldn't anybody understand that he was not really a freak but a normal, lonely adult trying to lead a normal, lonely adult life? If they pricked him, didn't he bleed? And if he was tickled, didn't he laugh? It seemed never to have occurred to them that he, just as they, had eyes, hands, organs, dimensions, senses and affections, that he was wounded by the same kind of weapons they were, warmed and cooled by the same breezes and fed by the same kind of food […]. (25.11)

The chaplain feels alienated from his peers. They do not see him as a human being, but as someone with a specific role. They do not identify with him, and he therefore is ostracized.