Symbolism: Open Prompt 1

In the novel Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, the author uses numerous symbols in order to drive home major themes in the play. One such example is the soldier in white that Yossarian, the main character, meets while in the hospital. The soldier in white is completely covered in bandages, and therefore no one can tell who he is or what he is like. He doesn’t talk, move or do much of anything. He eventually dies in the hospital, but it is unsure when or how it happened because the man was always silent, always still and there were no indications of life even before he died. It was always assumed that he was alive because he was still being taken care of in the hospital.

This soldier in white symbolizes the state of the soldiers in the military and how their commanding officers view them. Yossarian is a pilot for the army, and one of the main issues that he struggles with is the bureaucracy of the army. The soldiers are just pawns in a chess game to the officials. For instance, the commanding officer of Yossarian’s squad uses his squad to get promoted, or get acknowledgement for his achievements in the army. In order to get recognized, he sends his men on mission after mission, even though they have mental health problems from too much war. The commanding officers view Yossarian and the other soldiers as “men in white”, who have no faces, no personality, no unique traits – they aren’t really seen as human beings.

The soldier in white also represents how Yossarian expects to die. Yossarian’s main goal in this novel is to just stay alive. If he were to die, he would die just as the soldier in white did; he would just be another faceless pawn in the novel. He would die with no one knowing his name and all alone. Yossarian sees this as how the military treats its people, and how all military personnel die. Even back home, their deaths would just be marked as another death of a soldier and not that of a human being.

The soldier in white is taken away when he dies, and later on, another soldier in white replaces him. Everyone assumes that this is the same soldier, because they both appear in white bandages, when it is probably not, and this is a further example of the military’s inability to differentiate between different soldiers. Everyone is just classified under “soldier” and they don’t stand as their own person. Even if the soldier in white were to present themselves as a separate person, the characters in this novel would most likely not care; they would see the man as a soldier, who is in white, and would then think of him as the soldier in white, even though they know he is not the soldier in white they once knew. They don’t care enough about either the old or new soldier in white to give him a separate entity.

Joseph Heller, using symbols such as these, manages to write a very vivid and interesting novel. It speaks deeply about the state of war and how it affects mankind. By looking at single symbols, such as the man in white, we can assess for ourselves the state of the war setting that the novel takes place in.