Catch-22
故事发生在第二次世界大战期间，美国空军的
一支飞行大队驻守在意大利以南地中海上的一个小岛
上。主人公约塞连是这支飞行大队的上尉轰炸手。他
本来是一个正直勇敢、富有爱国心的青年。起初，他
抱着为祖国而战的信念，出色地完成了任务，因而被
提拔为上尉，还获得了一枚勋章。后来他发现周围的
人都在暗算他，企图置他于死地。他竭力要保全自己
的生命，他要逃离这个“世界”。最后，约塞连恍然大悟，
第二十二条军规原来是一个骗局，他临阵逃脱，跑到
瑞典去寻找避难所。
[ 美] 约瑟夫·海勒（ Joseph Helle）
The Texan
It was love at first sight.
The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in
love with him. Yossarian was in the hospital with a pain in his liver
that fell just short of being jaundice. The doctors were puzzled
by the fact that it wasn’t quite jaundice. If it became jaundice they
could treat it. If it didn’t become jaundice and went away they
could discharge him. But this just being short of jaundice all the
time confused them.
Each morning they came around，three brisk and serious
men with efficient mouths and inefficient eyes，accompanied by
brisk and serious Nurse Duckett，one of the ward nurses who
didn’t like Yossarian. They read the chart at the foot of the bed
and asked impatiently about the pain. They seemed irritated when
he told them it was exactly the same.
“Still no movement？”the full colonel demanded.
The doctors exchanged a look when he shook his head.
“Give him another pill.”Nurse Duckett made a note to give
Yossarian another pill，and the four of them moved along to the
next bed. None of the nurses liked Yossarian. Actually，the pain
in his liver had gone away，but Yossarian didn’t say anything and
the doctors never suspected. They just suspected that he had
been moving his bowels and not telling anyone.
Yossarian had everything he wanted in the hospital. The food
wasn’t too bad，and his meals were brought to him in bed. There
were extra rations of fresh meat，and during the hot part of the
afternoon he and the others were served chilled fruit juice or
chilled chocolate milk. Apart from the doctors and the nurses，no
one ever disturbed him. For a little while in the morning he had
to censor letters，but he was free after that to spend the rest
of each day lying around idly with a clear conscience. He was
comfortable in the hospital，and it was easy to stay on because
he always ran a temperature of 101.
After he had made up his mind to spend the rest of the war
in the hospital，Yossarian wrote letters to everyone he knew
saying that he was in the hospital but never mentioning why.
One day he had a better idea. To everyone he knew he wrote
that he was going on a very dangerous mission.“They asked for
volunteers. It’s very dangerous，but someone has to do it. I’ll
write you the instant I get back.”And he had not written anyone
since.
All the officer patients in the ward were forced to censor
letters written by all the enlisted-men patients，who were kept
in residence in wards of their own. It was a monotonous job，and
Yossarian was disappointed to learn that the lives of enlisted men
were only slightly more interesting than the lives of officers. After
the first day he had no curiosity at all. To break the monotony he
invented games. Death to all modifiers，he declared one day，
and out of every letter that passed through his hands went every
adverb and every adjective. The next day he made war on articles.
He reached a much higher plane of creativity the following day
when he blacked out everything in the letters but a，an and the.
That erected more dynamic intralinear tensions，he felt，and in
just about every case left a message far more universal. Soon he
was proscribing parts of salutations and signatures and leaving
the text untouched. One time he blacked out all but the salutation
“Dear Mary”from a letter，and at the bottom he wrote，“I yearn
for you tragically. R. O. Shipman，Chaplain，U. S. Army.”R.O. Shipman
was the group chaplain’s name.
When he had exhausted all possibilities in the letters，he
began attacking the names and addresses on the envelopes，
obliterating whole homes and streets，annihilating entire
metropolises with careless flicks of his wrist as though he were
God. Catch-22 required that each censored letter bear the
censoring officer’s name. Most letters he didn’t read at all. On
those he didn’t read at all he wrote his own name. On those
he did read he wrote，“Washington Irving”. When that grew
monotonous he wrote，“Irving Washington”. Censoring the
envelopes had serious repercussions，produced a ripple of anxiety