With regard to Catch-22, I have no idea if Heller was misogynistic or not but the misogyny in the book is intentional. It has the same purpose as anything else in the book. You aren't supposed to like the vast majority of the characters, and the narrator is supposed to be as fucked up as they are. A recurring theme in the book is that the even characters who seem the most likeable on the surface are actively psychotic or otherwise terrible and in no way better than the people they're fighting.
Thank you so much for the response, I really appreciate it.
This might just be my take on the story, but what I found was that each character had that one defining trait that made them truly terrible on the surface, but readers found themselves sympathising with them regardless of that because they were looking at them through the lens of war, which brings in a whole different set of questions related to morality. For example, I found Nately’s ideas of patriotism absolutely terrible and I hated him for them, but when he died I was still upset because I saw him as a naive 19 year old boy in the middle of a war he didn’t understand.
The same applies to anything else in the book that was supposed to be satirical, because it very obviously was. It was very clearly able to express the roles that capitalism, positions of power etc played in the war, but I felt like the misogyny was just there. It didn’t seem to serve any purpose for me, especially in the war context, and for the most part it wasn’t portrayed as something negative. For example, regardless of how terrible the ideals of any one of the characters were, there was always one character or another opposing them, like the chaplain, yossarian, etc. The misogyny, I felt, was never criticised.
But anyway, thanks for the criticism, I may be wrong so don’t hesitate to send me another message!
