What's the Catch: Dealing with World War II trauma and PTSD through black comedy in Joseph Heller's Catch-22.

The First World War was rife with literature that depicted the horrors of war, giving men and women back home a harrowing picture of what man could do, were he to choose to pursue nihilism to its extreme. Touted as "The War to end all wars", it was the great lie. Not a decade later, there was another war; only this time, frontline literature had gone nearly extinct. There were no direct successors to the First World War writers and owing to the mind-numbing extremity of this new war that dwarfed all those before it, there was little to be read. World War II had less literature and more news articles. Joseph Heller was one of the rarer breeds of men who experienced the war firsthand and yet lived to develop literature in its aftermath, albeit not during the war. In the 1960s, long after the war had ended, he came up with Catch-22, a novel depicting the true gruesomeness of the war but in a more palatable manner suited for the audience back at home. It was an epitome of black comedy, turning the indigestible horrors of war into a somewhat grim but comic tale of a man suffering from PTSD, or "Shell Shock" as it was called then. Yossarian's story spans the psychological impact of war on the human mind and the weariness resulting from years after years of war, dealing with violence, trauma, and the traumatic reflexes in the aftermath of the war as he stands naked—literally so—before his officers, following one of the bombing raids. This paper explores the vast chasm of violence, trauma and posttraumatic experiences via the use of Black Comedy and clinical humor in the wake of the second world war through Joseph Heller's Catch-22. A cross-sectional dissection of both the novel and the 2019 series is to be made through Trauma Theory and Psychoanalytical theory with a keen focus on Formalist Narratology and Satirical study to better understand the relationship between World War literature, trauma and traumatic disorders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]