Reality In An Absurdity—An Analysis Of Black Humor Through Catch-22

Joseph Heller is one of the most important novelists and representative writers of black humor in America in the second half of the twentieth century. His first novel Catch-22is a classic of ironic literature, which portrays the absurd life of an American Air Force troop in the Mediterranean island during the World War II and exposes a world with absurdity and abnormality.After World War II, Cold War and the subsequent period of McCarthyism, a number of Americans feel that life is absurd and future is unknown, so Heller portrays the American society in his eyes—a completely distorted world, which is the "organized chaos" and the "institutionalized madness". By mutual interpretation between the text and black humor theory, this thesis not only interprets the black humor theory through Catch-22, but also explores the creative characteristics of Catch-22under the direction of black humor theory.The thesis is divided into four parts. Chapter one gives an introduction to the life experience of the author, the novel’s plot and the literature review.Chapter two demonstrates the origin and development, the artistic features and the theoretical foundation of black humor theory. And the production of this theory has its own era background and literature origin. There is no doubt that the formation of a new literature theory has complicated theoretical foundations. Sartre’s existentialism, Freud’s psychoanalysis, Bergson’s intuitionism and the absurdism all have great impact on the production of the black humor theory.From the perspective of structure, language style and characters of the novel, chapter three explores the application of black humor in Catch-22. Readers could see an absurd society from distorted structure, illogical language and absurd characters. Within the framework of black humor theory, Heller sneers at the cruelty of the real society after war and he also uses absurd plots in the novel to reflect the absurdity, chaos and injustice of the real world.The last part is the conclusion. It summarizes how Heller uses black humor method to explore Catch-22so that the real world can be vividly presented to readers.