When I began reading Catch-22, I thought it was a farcical satire on life in the United States Army Air Force. Later I believed that Mr. Heller"s target was modern war and all those who are responsible for waging it. Still later it seemed that he was attacking social organization and anyone who derives power from it. But by the end of the book it had become plain to me that it is——no other phrase will do——the human condition itself which is the object of Mr. Heller"s outraged fury and disgust.
A reviewer must always keep an anxious eye on the state of his currency . If he announces too many pieces, he risks inflation( though it is sometimes forgotten by some of us that the cowardice of perpetual crabbing (挑剔) receives its own kind of punishment). It does not seem many weeks since I was proclaiming that Malcolm Lowry"s Under the Volcano is one of the great English novels of the century; and not long before that I was urging that attention should be paid to the magnificent and neglected talent of William Gerhardi.
But at the risk of inflation I cannot help writing that Catch-22 is the greatest satirical work in English since Erewhon. For the fact is that all my successive interpretations of this book now seem to have been accurate, even if the earlier ones were also incomplete. The book has an immense and devastating (讽刺的) theme, but this theme is illustrated, as it should be, by means of an observed reality.
I am not suggesting that Catch-22 is a realistic account of life in the war-time Air Force of America or any other country. The method of satire is to inflate (放大) reality so that all its partially concealed blemishes (缺点) turn into monstrous and apparent deformations. The effect of good satire is to make us laugh with horror. And this means that social and personal evils which are being satirized must have been there, and must be felt by the reader to be there even while he is laughing at the results of the satirist"s inflating imagination. The writer suggests that good satire （）