Focus Friday - Themes

Hello everybody, nice to see you again!

This week’s Friday Focus focuses on central themes in the book.

I want to draw out two themes I find to be central in the book; these two themes are the inevitability of death and the absolute power of bureaucracy.

Both of these are closely linked to each other, Yossarian and his squadron mates lives are not governed by their own decisions, but rather a frightening and impersonal bureaucracy. Forcing these men to risk their lives even though everybody there knows that the missions are useless and dangerous. Like when the war is just about over, they still have to fly on these missions, even though the war is essentially over. All attempts to reason and talk logically with the bureaucrats’ falls on deaf ears. They seem to try to defy logic at every turn they can, for example, Major Major only allows people to meet with him in the office when he himself is not there, and Doc Daneeka refuses to sign Yossarian's insanity papers that would ground him because his desire to be grounded proves to Doc Daneeka that he is completely sane. Another way the book shows us a way of bureaucracy being abused and misused is when Scheisskopf is interrogating Clevinger, Refusing to let Clevinger prove his innocence by spending all the time interrupting him by correcting Clevinger's grammatical errors and mispronunciations. 

Now on to the inevitability of death, As i have stated earlier Yossarian's only goal during this war is to Stay alive or die trying, Which he has based on an assumption that he will inevitably fail, due to both sides of the war trying to kill him either directly or indirectly. When the book starts, we already have one dead man, the one in Yossarian's tent that never signed in. Throughout the book, several people have lost their lives and Yossarian keeps visualizing how his own end will be like. Yet all of Yossarian's thoughts about his own death does not only have negative effects though. As his fear of death has gotten him to get more out of every pleasure, he has in life.

This book has many different themes, but these two are the ones i felt are most important to the main plot and our protagonist Yossarian.

But that's all for today folks, I’ll see you later this week when it's time to summarize everything I’ve read this week for you!