Unreliable Narration In Catch-22

Catch-22, a1961novel by Joseph Heller, which is widely lauded as the pioneering work of black humor for its use of chaotic narrative technique in describing ridiculous plots throughout the novel. Heller abandons the traditional realism and deliberately narrates in disordered spatial and temporal sequence, thus arranging confused narratives which seem to be illogic, but without the absurd surface the inner is the present of the true picture of the American callous society, people live in this absurd, unreasonable real world. And because of the absurd paradox of Catch-22, they stuck in the contradictory cycle from which anyone cannot escape. The fiction is characterized by numerous figures, disordered plots as well as ridiculous and absurd scenes. The features of characters and events are caricatured to be distorted and exaggerated for gaining black humorous effects.Throughout the existing researches on Catch-22at home and abroad, they are mainly stress on analyzing its absurd theme and black humor, little research has been done with its rhetorical narrative strategy of unreliable narration. Therefore, the research on unreliable narration of Catch-22will be relatively quite innovative. Generally, there are two research methods in the study of unreliable narration:the rhetorical approach and the cognitive approach. The thesis mainly adopts two American authoritative narratologists Wayne C. Booth’s classic definition of unreliable narration and James Phelan’s classification of unreliable narration along three axes as theoretical basis, and then focuses on several main characters and detailedly discusses the unreliability of their narrations which occurs along three different axes. The dynamic change of reliability of narrations, on the one hand, makes the implied author and readers be more or less distant from the narrators and characters in aspects of value or knowledge, on the other hand, it also increases the literary tension and results in effects of irony and defamiliarization.Through systematically analyzing unreliable narration in Catch-22, the significance of unreliable narration is discussed with regard to its importance in characterization, development of themes and transmission of his moral values. Heller adopts the rhetorical device of unreliable narration, gives readers a glimpse of a ridiculous real world and reveals the contradictory between the individuals and the modern bourgeois society, also the suppression on human beings. The thesis finally reveals Heller’s writing purpose and deeper morality and it helps readers to get a more comprehensive understanding about Joseph Heller and his works.