第二十二条军规毕业论文(英文).doc

毕业设计（论文）题 目： 从黑色幽默的角度分析第二十二条军规 An Analysis of the Catch-22 from the Perspective of Black Humor 学 院： 人文社会科学学院 专业班级： 英语07级2班 指导教师： 职称： 讲 师 学生姓名： 学 号： 407070 17从黑色幽默的角度分析第二十二条军规摘 要第二十二条军规是当代美国作家约瑟夫海勒的讽刺小说，被认为是黑色幽默的代表作。该作品发表后，黑色幽默这股文学浪潮才得以兴起。这部小说主要取材于约瑟夫海勒在空军服役期间的经历，讲述了一个喧闹，荒诞，富有讽刺意味同时又荡气回肠的战争故事。该小说以二战后期为创作背景，以黑色幽默的角度表现了战争的愚蠢，以一种极致的荒谬而不是对于痛苦和血腥场面的图解般描写的方式揭示了武装冲突的恐怖和毫无意义。本文阐述了黑色幽默的特点以及黑色幽默的影响，对第二十二条军规做了大概描述，并从人物塑造，语言使用，社会环境，结构特点四方面以黑色幽默的视角阐明了世界的荒诞性，旨在为更好的理解该文学作品和黑色幽默的精髓提供启迪。关键词：第二十二条军规，黑色幽默，荒诞，约瑟连 An Analysis of the Catch-22 from the Perspective of Black HumorAbstractCatch-22 is a satirical novel by the contemporary American author Joseph Heller. Since its publication, the literature trend toward black humor becomes prevalent. The novel draws heavily on his air force experience and presents a war story that is at once hilarious, grotesque, cynical and stirring. The novel, set during the latter stage of World War, presenting the horrible meaninglessness of armed conflicts through a kind of desperate absurdity rather than through graphic depictions of suffering and violence. The paper is going to talk about the characteristics of black humor and the significances of black humor. Then the author talks about the general idea in Joseph Hellers masterpieces Catch-22, analyses the absurdity of world from characterization, language use and society involved in the Catch-22. This paper aims to bring enlightenment to the comprehension of the novel and understanding of the black humor.Key Words: Catch-22; black humor; absurdity; Yossarian Table of contents. Introduction1.Literature Review3A. Black Humor31.Characteristic of Black Humor32. Significance of Black Humor in American Literature4B. The Background of Black Humor and Catch-224C. Joseph Heller and His Catch-225III.Analysis of the Black Humor in Catch-22 from Four Aspects6A. Characters61. Characteristics of Yossarian62. The Soldier in White83. Characteristics of Milo9B. Social Circumstance101. The Impotence of Language102. The Absolute Power of Bureaucracy113.Loss of Religious Faith12C. Symbolic Meanings131. Catch-22132. Aerial Photographs143. Chocolate-Covered Cotton15D. Structural Feature15.Conclusion16Bibliography17An Analysis of the Catch-22 from thePerspective of Black Humor . Introduction The novel of absurd can be explained as novel of black humor. Since the publication of Catch-22, the literature trend toward black humor became prevalent. The use of black humor in Catch-22 is a perfect example of its very intention. This paper is going to discuss Joseph Hellers masterpiece Catch-22 from the perspective of black humor. In this paper, the author will try to discuss some representative characteristics, social circumstances, symbolic meanings and the structure features. Making readers clearer of the black humor and more familiar with the novel of absurd which uses the perspective of black humor to present the absurd world. After the reader grasps its true meaning, they could not help the bitter simile. Catch-22 has become one of the defying novels of the twentieth century. It presents an utterly unsentimental vision of war, stripping all romantic pretenses away from combat, replacing visions of glory and honor with a kind of night marsh comedy of violence, bureaucracy, and paradoxical madness. Catch-22 relies heavily on humor to convey the insanity of war, presenting the horrible meaningless of armed conflict through a kind of desperate absurdity rather than through graphic depictions of suffering and violence.After the publication of Catch-22 that Heller as a specialized writer is remembered by the world. This work is called the epic in the 1960s. By describing an apparently crazy world, he exposes the corruption of American society, where the social bureaucrats, related to capital power, brought suffering and death to the ordinary people. Joseph Heller put abnormal people and things as normal in writing, making so incredible things reasonable so that all the normal things become ridiculous and the absurd world is full of humor. The novel Catch-22 mainly tells a story about a pilot soldier named Yossarian. This story happens in the Word War . Serving in the army for a long time, he gets tired of it, and wants to go back home away from the war and from the threat to be killed. After the death of his friends Snowden, Yossarian begins to be grounded, to be an ordinary person away from the cruel world. In order to accomplish his dream, he pretends to be insane; to be ill and even behaves in insane manners. At last , he , obeying his own authentic -self , refuses to work together with the upper official and deserts from the army, in doing so, he turns back on the dehumanizing cold machinery of the military rejects the rule of Catch-22, and strives for a future in which his in control of his own life.One of the main goals of this paper is to satirize the dehumanizing machinery of the war by showing the irremovable survival impulse at the heart of every individual. By constantly making fun of wartime situations and by carrying arguments to their extreme, absurd conclusions. The paper shows the absurd of the world with black humor. Through a maze of characters and events. This paper explores war and bureaucracy and their effects on ordinary people. This paper aims at provoking the readers response to the blackness of modern life as laughter, or, laughing in face of a tragic situation. Based the background materials and some other materials, this paper will try to do some more research and make readers clearer with black humor in the Catch-22. .Literature Review A. Black Humor In 2004, professors You Nanchun and Xu Lehui, who taught in the Liaoning Normal University, published the article named “The Study of the Characteristics of Black Humor” in the Journal of Liaoning Normal University. In this article which introduced the black humor, in literature, drama, and film used to express the absurdity in sensitivity, paradox, and cruelty of the modern world. Ordinary characters or situations are usually exaggerated far beyond the limits of normal satire or irony. Black humor uses devices often associated with tragedy and is sometimes equated with tragic farce. They discuss some representative characteristics of the black humor and the significance of black humor.1. Characteristic of Black Humor If art is the reflection of reality, then black humor novelists firstly find out formlessness and exaggeration in art. Since the world is incomprehensible and absurd, its presentation is certainly illogical, irrational, like magnification of a microscope, or formlessness technique of magical mirror. This presents to us the abnormal phenomenon which can not be seen in normal situation, and lead to the effect of absurdity.Another literary technique that the black humor writers often use is funny satire. While presenting the human in ridiculous and strange condition, it narrative tone is cold and indifferent, and even with ridicule and mockery, with a tone of indifferent seems like the description of an antique. It is full of fun, ridicule and satire, the writer made a grotesque, horrible joke, but it is also a provoking joke.From the perspective of novel, the traditional novels continued narrative structure disappeared in the black humor writers works. Black humor writers generally followed a move fragmented structure, often wrote the novel in scattered fragments. Fragmentation of narrative structure and collection of specimens in the major feature of black humor writers works. 2. Significance of Black Humor in American LiteratureAs everyone knows that social consciousness reflects the social exists, the novel reflects the real world from some perspectives. In the novel, the characters and plots are in chaotic, messy, crazy and fragmented world.In twentieth century, robots became more and more like human, but some people became more and more like robot. From this, while black humor writers exposing the absurdity and misery of life, the writers also exposed the ever-changing high-techs dehumanization of people with writers consideration of the relationship between the high-tech and humans life. From this perspective, the writers wanted to arouse peoples awareness of the ever-changing high-tech.In the novel, the disaster of different characters caused by the war can show the protagonists will to escape from war. In this way, the writers aim of protesting against war through the description of the disaster and absurdity of military group can be shown in the novel. After reading the story, readers will be disgusted with the war. So the aim of struggling against war can be achieved though the reading and writing.B. The Background of Black Humor and Catch-22Since the 1960s, it has been a disturbing time in American social. People found the boundaries between fact and fiction obscured or no longer existing. This is a period of changes for the American novel. Traditional realistic narrative techniques were and changes was inevitable inadequate and falsifying in presenting life. It was already happening at that time. The 1960s and 1970s was a period in which all people had come to sense that absurdity exists on all conceivable levels of life, and it was the “absurd” novelists who discovered a new rhetoric effective enough to voice that feeling in literature. The novelist of the absurd tends to comically or exaggeratedly imitate traditional novelistic devices. They parody other novel other styles and forms and take them with highly ambiguous attitudes. They thought that truth and reality are multiple difficult to capture, and uncertain. During the 1960s and 1970s, it was those decades that American youth truly began to question authority. Hippies, university protests, and the civil right movement all marked the 1960s as a decade of revolution. The author Zhao Guofan says the World War exerted great influence on black humor. There was a study by GarywDavis, in a de tailed summary of Catch-22; He criticized that Catch-22 Joseph Heller the idea that there is no single definitive truth that the word is the form of a continual clash of truth. Heller permeates his ideas of black humor throughout the novel. Each character lives within his/her own world where each creates their individual ideas of right and wrong. C. Joseph Heller and His Catch-22The Professor Timothy Sexton, who taught in California, published Cach-22 and the Black Humor which introduced Catch-22 was inspired by Hellers own World War II experience as a youthful bombardier in the European theater.Joseph Hellers novelCatch-22is satirical masterpiece that has been enjoyed by readers for decades. It was the first novel to transform the World Warfrom a human tragedyinto an absurdist comedy and proved that nothing is sacrosanct in literature. The novel uses satire and dark humor and a non-traditional structure to keep the reader off-balance just long enough for Heller to unleash his more serious themes. War must be the ultimate absurdity of human existence. How else to explain engaging in violence repeatedly and consistently throughout millennia in attempt to impose peace? Catch-22was one of the first novels to portray the seriousness of war as a comedy, albeit a comedy of extraordinary darkness. Indeed, there is too much peculiar beauty worth exploring in Hellers Catch-22. And the most fearful beauty of Catch-22 lies in the fact that the author seized something truly profound of every individual with his incisive insight; and that something if often deliberately constrained and concealed in real life. However, Heller found the best break though point-black humor plus a war setting. No other choices can better reflect the spiritual perplexities of American people in 1960s than them. Of cause what else is worth mention is that the insanity and absurdity of human society shown in the book is not the patent of war setting, it might extent to a peaceful time. So when the book is closed, who dares to say that he had never experienced the pain of “ignorant armies clash by night”? The primary weapon that Joseph Heller uses to explode his satirical bombs in Catch-22 is black humor. Black humor has been defined by French surrealist Andre Breton as a “lampooning of social conventions and a profound disrespect for the nobility of literature.III.Analysis of the Black Humor in Catch-22 from Four AspectsA. Characters1. Characteristics of YossarianYossarians story forms the core of the novel, so most events is refracted though his point of view. Yossarian takes the whole war personally, rather than being swayed by national ideals or abstract principles. Yossarian is furious that his life is constant danger through no fault of his own. He has a strong desire to live and determined to be immoral or die trying. As a result, he spends a great deal of his time in the hospital, faking various illnesses in order to avoid the war. The novel draws to a close as Yossarian, troubled by Natelys death, refuses to fly any more missions. He wonders the streets of Rome without encountering every possible kind of human horror-form rapes disease, murder. He is eventually arrested for being in Rome without a pass, and his superior officers, Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Koran, offer him a choice; he can either face a court-martial or be released and sent home with and honorable discharge. There is only one condition: in order to be released, he must approve of Cathcart and Korn and state his support for their policy, which requires all the men in the 5 quadroon to fly eighty missions. Although he is tempted by the offer, Yossarian realizes that to comply would be to endanger the live of other innocent men; he chooses another way out, deciding to desert the army and flee to neutral Sweden. In doing so, he turns his back on the dehumanizing cold machinery of the military, rejects the rule of Catch-22, and strives for a future in which he is in control of his own life. Generally speaking, Yossarian is a hero of black humor. He is utterly a ware of his situation. Not only dose he not go a long with evil trend, but also not belittle himself. At last he chooses to desert. It is a method of taking his life back into his own hand. Yossarians choice informs that whenever we make a choice, we must be responsible not only for ourselves, but for the others. Yossarian, living in all unfavorable circumstance, he resists the irrationality in an absurd way. He shows us his brevity by saying “no” to the Catch-22, and it is a “no” to the absurd world.Yossarian, the protagonist of Catch-22, is both a member of the squadrons community and alienated by it. Although he flies and lives with the men, he is marked as an outsider by the fact that many of men think he is insane. Even his Assyrian name is unusual; no one has ever heard it before. His different from the rest of the men leads us to expect something exceptional from Yossarian.But Yossarians characteristics are not those of typical hero. He does not risk his life to save others; in fact, his primary goal throughout the novel is to avoid risking his life whenever possible. But the system of values around Yossarian is so skewed that this approach seems to be the only truly moral stance he can take, if only because it is so logical. What we come to hate about military bureaucracy as we read Catch-22 is again for reasons that are utterly illogical and unimportant. Out of this sea of ant logic, Yossarian is able to seize and hold onto one true, logical idea- that he should try to preserve life. Unlike a conventional hero, however, Yossarian does not generalize this idea to mean that he should risk his own life in attempts to save everybody elses. In a world where life itself is so undervalued and so casually lost, it is possible to redefine heroism as simple self-preservation.This insistence on self preservation creates a conflict for Yossarian. Even though he is determined to save his own life at all costs, he nonetheless cares deeply for the other members of his squadron and is traumatized by their deaths. His ongoing horror at Snowdens death stems both from his pity for Snowden and from his horrified realization that his own body is just as destructible as Snowdens. In the end, when offered a choice between his own safety and the safety of the entire squadron, Yossarian is unable to choose himself over others. This concern creates its own Catch-22: life is not worth living without moral concern for the well-being of others, but a moral concern for the well-being of others endangers ones life. Yossarian ultimately escapes this conundrum by literally walking away from the war- an action that refuse both the possibility of becoming an officer who avoids danger at the expense of his troops and that of remaining at soldier who risks his life for meaningless reasons.Whats more, the naming of Yossarian is also very classic. Yossarian is so afraid of death, but he himself mentioned that he was one of the already extinguished Assyrian, not to mention the closeness in spelling and sound between Yossarian and Assyrian. Readers can easily perceive the irony implied in this naming. And his pet name, Yo-Yo, in another sense, is a round-shaped toy made from wood or plastic, which is nevertheless controlled by a thin rope. No matter how far th