Chapters 29-34
I think that the main message that Heller was trying to imbed in his novel “Catch-22,” was that the bureaucracy is a collection of fools accomplishing very little at huge costs due to the fact that the members are mindless sheep, incapable of making their own decisions and cannot work together to achieve common goals because they are torn apart by corruption and their desire to compete with one another rather than work together. And because they know that they are not accomplishing anything of worth, they occupy themselves with meaningless tasks that do not move the nation, or in this case, the war, forward but instead just muddle with the system more thus making it even harder to fix later. For example we have the “war” between General Peckem and General Dreedle in which the two men are constantly trying to expand their operations to out do one another and gain more credibility, because both men are more interested in their own childish squabbles than actually helping end the war (312-316). Furthermore, Heller points to the men that work below the generals and argues that they are the ones best suited to fix the situation because they are the ones seeing it first hand, but rather than attempt to quell the chaos, they follow the poor examples set for them and continue doing pointless things like canceling unscheduled parades and U.S.O. shows (317-318). This idiocy leads to people, like Doc Daneeka slipping through the cracks of the system, and greed ruling the system rather than principle (333, 343).
