Study On Joseph Heller's Novels

The famous American novelist, representative writer of "Black Humor" Joseph Heller created six novels all his life. This paper inquire into and analyze his novels' penetrating and wide significance of criticizing social culture, consciousness of Judgment Day and versatile means of artistic expression.One. Many-sided criticism of the culture of the American societyHeller's novels involves many visual angels such as the external world and the internal world, ancient times and the present time, adult and teenager, Jew and white man and so on; various relations such as ruler and common people, God and mankind, father and child, husband and wife and so on; many social organizations such as troops, government, enterprise, school, family and so on. His novels criticize the American society predominated by bureaucracy, formalism, money worship, individualism and egoism and disclose the completely collapse of the contemporary system of moral and worth and the modern people's spirit alienation and loss.Two. Consciousness of Judgment DayHeller completely analyzes vicious, abnormal and declining American society and expresses the strong consciousness of Judgment Day. In his view, mankind, particularly the United States has had no hope and can't avoid the decline of the mankind's civilization and the world 's end. Consciousness of Judgment Day in Heller's novels shows pessimistic keynote. But from his artistic world we can see the "focus" of American culture. Moreover, it makes us introspect the illness ourselves during the course of developing mankind's culture. On the other hand, his pessimism is a kind of protest in which he expresses the concern about mankind, summon for human nature appeal for humanity and hope for future.Three. Versatile means of artistic expressionHeller makes use of various artistry creatively in his novels, which strongly expresses and deepens his novels' topic.1. AnachronismusIn literary works, it "refers to violating real developing sequence of history and arranging character, affair, idea, custom and made of thinking wrongly." Heller often uses this means to contact different ages for the purpose of parabling the contemporary American society.2. Black HumorThe term "Black Humor" sometimes is viewed as a kind of literal school, sometimes refers to a kind of artistic skill. As an artistic skill, Black Humor refers to coping all of "black" things with cold, amusing, ridiculous and incapable attitude and adopting artistries such as satire, exaggeration and so on. Heller melts various techniques and methods into the Black Humor skill to obtain the special artistic result. First, Antinomy of logic. This method mixes two irrelevant things and results in the antinomy of subjectiveness and objectiveness to attain the intention of satirizing. Second, Paradox. It "is a statement that is superficially self-contradict or absurd, but proves to be meaningful." Contradiction and paradox of language reveal the world describing by this kind of language: everything of the world violates its superficial phenomenon and absurd stager and irrational confusion is its standard. In the world language not only becomes tool of degenerate but sinks low itself. True and false, right and wrong, realistic and unrealistic have not been distinguished. Third, Exaggeration. This rhetoric means enlarges the pace of character and environment, which makes fantastic place more fantastic.3. Stucture unifying external unsystematism and internal systermatismIn Heller's novels the connecting of character's action and details are broken and realistic time and historical time is reversed and the sequence of past, now, future is cut open and disrupted, which shows unsystematism. But under the superficial unsystematical state, his novels exist unified structure. Every novel is elaboratedly constructed and has its internal systematism.4. Blend of reality and unrealityThough Heller's novels reflect the realistic life, they are not part of realism. In them, the names of realistic persons in real li...