| I enjoy the humour and irony in the first part of the novel very much. But the novel speaks to me at a level deeper than that. I do not agree that this novel is about war or anti-war (even if that might have been what Joseph Heller had intended it to be), just like I do not agree that Little Red Riding Hood is a story about human's relationship with big bad wolf. This novel is about the senseless and hopeless situation that an ordinary man can find himself in when his life is controlled by an unsympathetic, badly-managed, demoralized system that has lost its purpose, where the men at top are preoccupied with advancing their own interests and mismanage everything at the expense of all the enlisted men whose survival is under constant threat, less from the flak of enemy fire, but more from their own generals and colonels. I believe many of us can relate to that without having to have experienced wars. Towards the end of the novel, it becomes more engrossing but also very sad as the characters I have grown to care fall victims to the system one by one. I'm very glad the book provides a Shawshank Redemption kind of ending, with a hope. That part got my eyes moistened. This is a great book, but probably not for all readers. |
