【正确答案】正确答案： Catch-22 was the first book in America to treat the absurdist theme with absurdist techniques. It protests against the absurdity of modern America as embodied by the military power structure it describes. The world of one of the protagonists Yossarian is an absurd one, and the way Heller exposes it is through burlesque, the ruthless burlesque of the military unreason as best represented by its three major features: the structured chaos of the military build-up, the military logic, one symbol of which is a "rule" known as "Catch-22" , and the widespread absurdity on all levels of existence. First the chaos in the military structure is well illustrated in the novel: people still very much alive like Doc Daneeka are declared dead and people long dead such as Mudd are kept "alive" on the official roster; one officer, Major Major, welcomes visitors in his office only when he is out. What the author castigates is the absurdity of not only the military bureaucracy but the whole of the capitalist world in which a traitor like Milo, who profiteers in the war and plots the German bombing of the American squadron, is set free simply because he has made money. Another object of ridicule is the military logic inherent in the monstrous establishment. The bureaucracy has more faith in paper work than in the stark reality of the war. Then there is this overriding Catch-22, which does its work effectively in absurd situations. Furthermore, Joseph Heller uses an absurd linguistic surface to reflect the depth of the absurdity of the modern world—devices such as "circular conversations" constructions with their comic, unexpected responses, the "wrenched clich " which results from the change of "a key word in an otherwise hackneyed expression" , sudden tonal changes from seriousness to triviality. One other formal feature of the novel is its apparent "formlessness". The novel is arranged by the names of the characters rather than follows a casual or sequential order. Events recur; past and present mingle. Time as a frame of reference ceases to exist. Narrated in the third person but with Yossarian as the presiding consciousness, the novel reads like a mind reminiscing about a nightmare of the past.