Clevinger and Yossarian

Clevinger and Yossarian are the novel's primary intellectual foils, their relationship a running philosophical duel that exposes the irreconcilable tension between institutional faith and individual survival. Clevinger, a gangling, gawky Harvard graduate who won prizes in scholarship for everything, is a genius with a pounding heart and a blanching face, a man of immense intelligence and, as Yossarian sees it, no brains. Yossarian, by contrast, is a shrewd, terrified bombardier who has concluded that the entire war effort is a plot to kill him personally. Their friendship is forged in the crucible of this fundamental disagreement, and it is Clevinger's fate—to vanish without a trace—that becomes the most devastating proof of Yossarian's thesis.

The Argument Over Sanity and Survival

The last time they saw each other before Yossarian fled into the hospital, Clevinger called him crazy. At the officers' club, Yossarian calmly stated, "They're trying to kill me." Clevinger, apoplectic with rage, shouted back, "No one's trying to kill you." When Yossarian pointed out that strangers shot at him with cannons every time he flew, Clevinger retorted, "They're shooting at everyone. They're trying to kill everyone." Yossarian's devastating reply—"And what difference does that make?"—reduced Clevinger to sputtering, tearful fury. For Clevinger, who believed passionately in principles, the distinction between being targeted and being caught in a general war was absolute. For Yossarian, it was meaningless. This exchange, which ended with Clevinger gasping for air and blinking back bitter tears of conviction, established the pattern of their relationship: Clevinger's rational, principled outrage against Yossarian's visceral, self-preserving logic.

The Educational Sessions and the Question of Snowden

Their conflict extended into the educational sessions Clevinger conducted twice a week in Captain Black's intelligence tent. Yossarian attended not to learn, but to find out why so many people were working so hard to kill him. When Clevinger and the subversive corporal made the mistake of asking for questions, Yossarian unleashed a barrage of absurdist inquiries—"Who is Spain?" "Why is Hitler?" "When is right?"—culminating in the question that had no answer: "Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?" The question upset everyone, because Snowden had been killed over Avignon when Dobbs went crazy in mid-air. Yossarian pursued the corporal through all the words in the world to wring the knowledge from him, but Clevinger intervened, pale and laboring for breath, a humid coating of tears already glistening in his undernourished eyes. The sessions were eventually discontinued by Colonel Korn's rule that only people who never asked questions were permitted to ask them.

The Bologna Dispute and the Bomb Line

Their most explicit confrontation came during the Great Big Siege of Bologna, when Yossarian confessed that he had moved the bomb line to cancel the mission. Clevinger was livid with condemnation. "What about the men on the mainland?" he demanded. "Are they supposed to get their asses shot off just because you don't want to go?" Yossarian snarled back that he was not obliged to die just because Colonel Cathcart wanted to be a general. Clevinger insisted that it was not for them to determine what targets must be destroyed or who gets killed doing it. Yossarian, with weighted precision, retorted, "The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on, and that includes Colonel Cathcart." He warned Clevinger that the longer he remembered that, the longer he might live. But Clevinger forgot, and now he was dead.

Disappearance and Aftermath

Clevinger's death was as mysterious as it was absolute. Eighteen planes let down through a beaming white cloud off the coast of Elba one afternoon on the way back from the weekly milk run to Parma; seventeen came out. No trace was ever found of the other, not in the air or on the smooth surface of the jade waters below. There was no debris. Helicopters circled the white cloud till sunset. During the night the cloud blew away, and in the morning there was no more Clevinger. The disappearance was astounding, as astounding as the Grand Conspiracy of Lowery Field. For Yossarian, it was the final, irrefutable proof that the universe was indifferent and that the only sane response was to fight for one's own life. Clevinger's ghost haunts the novel's later pages: Yossarian, lying in the hospital after being stabbed by Nately's whore, thinks of Clevinger as one of the pals the authorities have taken from him. He wonders if even Clevinger might be alive somewhere inside that cloud, hiding until it is safe to come out. The thought is a desperate hope, but it is also a measure of how much Yossarian valued the friend he could never agree with.