Nately finishes the seventy
missions required to be sent home.� He chooses to remain and keep flying
missions so he can be near the prostitute he loves, but even if he did not want
to, it would not matter, because Colonel Cathcart raises the number of missions
to eighty.� Cathcart does this so that other men will fly Milo's missions so
that Milo can keep running the syndicate and cheating the men out of their
money.� Nately is killed on his next mission.
Chaplain Tappman wants to
console Yossarian, but he is dragged away by government officials who want to
interrogate him.� They try to intimidate him into admitting to crimes that they
do not even specify.� They assume he is guilty and ask ridiculous questions,
refusing to listen to his answers.� They declare him guilty and then send him
away, informing him that they will beat him senseless sometime when he does not
expect it.
This incident plus Nately's
death give the chaplain courage to confront Colonel Korn about the number of
missions the men have to fly.� Unfortunately, now Scheisskopf is a general and
in charge, and all he cares about is parades.� Yossarian simply refuses to fly
any more missions.� The officials do not know what to do.� They cannot
court-martial him because he has a medal, but they cannot let him refuse to fly
because then the other men would refuse, too.
Meanwhile, Nately's
prostitute tries to kill Yossarian because he brought the news about Nately's
death.� She keeps popping up out of nowhere with knives.� Then, she stops
showing up, and Yossarian is worried something has happened to her.� When
Captain Black tells him that the whole brothel has been cleared out in Rome, Yossarian is concerned.
Analysis
The chaplain suddenly gets
courage, but it does not matter because the armed forces are run by immoral
people who just want to protect their own interests.� Simply trying to change
the system from within will not accomplish anything.� The chaplain is still
playing by the rules and trying to complain up the chain of command, but it is
clear that the rules are designed to accomplish whatever those in power want.�
This is clear by the outrageous interrogation they put him through.
Yossarian's method of
fighting back is simply to stop acknowledging the rules.� He just will not
fly.� He may be court-martialed or not, but he just refuses to go along with
the rule that the men in his group have to fly many more missions than anyone
else.� This is a more passive resistance, but it is more effective because it
confuses the people in charge.� They cannot use the rules to their advantage
because Yossarian simply ignores the rules.
|
