New York

New York appears in Catch-22 not as a setting for combat but as a place of origin, memory, and civilian life that stands in stark contrast to the war on Pianosa. It is the home of the dead soldier's family, the site of Doc Daneeka's prewar medical practice, and the place Yossarian associates with his family and with the idea of escape. The city functions as a geographical and emotional anchor, representing the world the men have left behind and, for some, the world they hope to return to.

The Dead Soldier's Family from New York

The most direct appearance of New York in the novel occurs when the mother, father, and brother of a soldier who has died in the hospital travel all the way from New York to see him before he dies. They arrive too late and are instead brought to Yossarian's bedside, where they mistake him for their son and brother. The mother, a woman with a long, brooding oval face and coarse graying black hair, sits in a chair with her veinous fingers clasped in her lap and repeatedly calls Yossarian "Giuseppe." The father, a broad, muscular man in a double-breasted suit with padded shoulders, stands rigidly with his black felt fedora held in his brawny laborer's hands. The brother, a glowering heavy-set sailor with a deep chest, wears his round white cap at an insolent tilt and warns Yossarian not to let anyone push him around, even though he is Italian. The family's grief is raw and immediate; they all begin to cry, and Yossarian, remembering why they are crying, begins to cry too. Before leaving, the father asks Yossarian to tell "the man upstairs" that it is not right for people to die when they are young, and the mother, seeming to know, tells him to dress warm.

Doc Daneeka's Failed Practice in New York

New York is also the location of Doc Daneeka's civilian medical practice, which he describes in detail to Yossarian. His office was in Staten Island, in a two-family firetrap just four blocks from the ferry stop and only one block south of a supermarket, three beauty parlors, and two corrupt druggists. Despite the corner location, the practice failed because population turnover was small and people clung to their established physicians. Bills piled up, and his most precious medical instruments—an adding machine and a typewriter—were repossessed. His goldfish died. The war, he confesses solemnly, was a godsend, because most other doctors were soon in the service and things picked up overnight. He upped his kickback fee with the two drugstores, and the beauty parlors were good for two or three abortions a week. But then the draft board sent a man to examine him, and despite his own diagnosis that he was unfit for service—he claimed to have one leg amputated at the hip and to be helplessly bedridden with incurable rheumatoid arthritis—he was drafted and shipped to Pianosa as a flight surgeon.

Yossarian's Family and New York as Origin

Yossarian's own family is associated with New York. Orr, Yossarian's tentmate, is said to be "from the wilderness outside New York City" and knows much more about wildlife than Yossarian does. Yossarian reflects that Orr, unlike his mother, father, sister, brother, aunt, uncle, in-law, teacher, spiritual leader, legislator, neighbor, and newspaper, has never lied to him about anything crucial before. This list of relatives and authority figures, all implicitly located in or associated with the civilian world Yossarian left behind, establishes New York as the place of his upbringing and the source of the conventional wisdom he has come to distrust.

New York as a Symbol of Memory and Escape

New York recurs in Yossarian's thoughts as a place of memory and a potential destination. After the mission to Avignon, when Snowden is dying in the back of the plane, Yossarian thinks of the dead people he has known, including all the aunts, uncles, neighbors, parents, and grandparents he knew when a child—his own and everyone else's—and all the pathetic, deluded shopkeepers who opened their small, dusty stores at dawn and worked in them foolishly until midnight. These are all dead, and the number of dead people just seems to increase. Later, when Yossarian is recovering from being stabbed by Nately's whore, he reflects that the thought occurs to him that maybe Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Korn are right—that they are smart and the rest of them are dumb. This moment of doubt is framed by his earlier, more confident sense of self, which was rooted in the world he came from. Ultimately, Yossarian decides not to return to New York or to accept the deal that would send him home a hero, but instead to escape to Sweden, leaving behind the world that New York represents.

Snowden's Secret and the Universal City

Snowden's secret, which Yossarian learns over Avignon, is that "man was matter." This revelation is tied to the image of Snowden's entrails spilling out, and it is a truth that applies to all people, everywhere, including those in New York. The novel's final, nightmarish vision of Rome—the Eternal City—is a catalog of human suffering that mirrors the suffering of war and implicitly includes the suffering of all cities, including New York. Yossarian's decision to run away to Sweden is a rejection of the entire system that produces such suffering, a system that operates in New York as surely as it does on Pianosa.