How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #21
He [Nately] kept blushing giddily in shy embarrassment and saying he was sorry when Yossarian came over to apologize for hitting him. Yossarian felt terrible; he could hardly bear to look at Nately's battered countenance […]. (34.13)
Yossarian's true affection for and friendship with Nately makes him embarrassed that he did such a horrible thing to his friend. Yossarian shows his integrity by apologizing to Nately and trying to keep their friendship alive.
Quote #22
All at once he realized – though the writhing turbulence beneath him had not diminished one whit – that she was no longer grappling with him, recognized with a quiver that she was not fighting him but heaving her pelvis up against him remorselessly in the primal, powerful rhapsodic instinctual rhythm of erotic ardor and abandonment. He gasped in delighted surprise. Her face – as beautiful as a blooming flower to him now – was distorted with a new kind of torture, the tissues serenely swollen, her half-closed eyes misty and unseeing with the stultifying languor of desire.
[…]
He stroked her hair. She drove her mouth against his face with savage passion. He licked her neck. She wrapped her arms around him and hugged. He felt himself falling, falling ecstatically in love with her as she kissed him again and again with lips that were steaming and wet and soft and hard, mumbling deep sounds to him adoringly in an incoherent oblivion of rapture, one caressing hand on his back slipping deftly down inside his trouser belt while the other groped secretly and treacherously about on the floor for the bread knife and found it. He saved himself just in time. She still wanted to kill him! He was shocked and astounded by her depraved subterfuge as he tore the knife from her grasp and hurled it away. (38.17-19)
Sex is used as a deception, a decoy during which Nately's prostitute can find the knife to kill Yossarian.
Quote #23
"Milo, I'm talking about a little girl!" Yossarian interrupted him with desperate impatience. "Don't you understand? I don't want to sleep with her. I want to help her […]. She's just a little kid, and she's all alone in this city with no one to take care of her. I want to protect her from harm. Don't you know what I'm talking about?" (39.53)
Yossarian shows his moral grounding and integrity by selflessly wanting to help this child. He could gain pleasure from her by sleeping with her, but his ethics will not allow him to do such a thing. He has nothing but an altruistic desire to protect her.
Quote #24
Yossarian knew he could help the troubled old woman if she would only cry out, knew he could spring forward and capture the sturdy first woman and hold her for the mob of policemen nearby if the second woman would only give him license with a shriek of distress. But the old woman passed by without even seeing him, mumbling in terrible, tragic vexation, and soon the first woman had vanished into the deepening layers of darkness and the old woman was left standing helplessly in the center of the thoroughfare, dazed, uncertain which way to proceed, alone. Yossarian tore his eyes from her and hurried away in shame because he had done nothing to assist her. (39.81)
Yossarian betrays his own morality and sense of righteousness when he refuses to help the troubled old woman. This leaves him feeling guilty and ashamed.
Quote #25
[Major Danby:] "But why did you make such a deal if you didn't like it?"
"I did it in a moment of weakness," Yossarian wisecracked with glum irony. (42.13-14)
Yossarian admits that agreeing to the immoral deal from Colonel Cathcart and Korn represented a moment of moral weakness. He restores his integrity by breaking the deal.