Nurse Cramer
Nurse Cramer is a ward nurse at the Pianosa hospital whose combination of sentimental piety, officious duty, and emotional fragility makes her a minor but telling embodiment of the institutional hypocrisy and callousness that Yossarian confronts. She is introduced as one of the brisk, serious medical attendants who accompany the doctors on their rounds, a shapely, pretty, sexless young woman with a wholesome unattractive face, a cute nose, and a radiant, blooming complexion dotted with fetching sprays of adorable freckles that Yossarian detests. Her virtuous, pale-blue, saucerlike eyes flood with leviathan tears on unexpected occasions, a sentimentality that Yossarian finds maddening because it is directed at the wrong objects.
Role in the Soldier in White Episodes
Nurse Cramer's most significant action is her management of the Soldier in White, the patient encased from head to toe in plaster and gauze with a thermometer balanced in the dark hole over his mouth. Early each morning and late each afternoon she enters the ward with a jar full of thermometers, works her way up one side and down the other, and for the Soldier in White she simply inserts a thermometer into the hole over his mouth and leaves it balanced there on the lower rim. One afternoon, when she completes her first circuit of the ward and comes a second time to the Soldier in White, she reads his thermometer and discovers that he is dead. Dunbar immediately calls her a murderer, and Yossarian joins in, accusing her of killing the patient. The Texan protests that he never touched the man, but Yossarian and Dunbar insist that Nurse Cramer's act of reading the thermometer and reporting what she found is what terminated the life that was all the Soldier in White had. Yossarian later reflects that if she had not read the thermometer, the Soldier in White might still be lying there alive, and he feels that the decision to end that life should hardly have been Nurse Cramer's.
When a second Soldier in White appears in the ward later in the novel, Nurse Cramer is again at the center of the ensuing chaos. As patients begin screaming and running in panic at the sight of the familiar, morbid figure, Nurse Cramer is there in the middle like a spinning policeman, trying desperately to restore order, but she dissolves helplessly into tears when she fails. She screams, "He's back! He's back!" and sinks into Nurse Duckett's arms, utterly unable to control the ward. Her hysterical cry, "There's no one inside!" fuels the panic, and she is ultimately as useless in the crisis as she was decisive in the first Soldier in White's death.
Relationship with Yossarian and Nurse Duckett
Nurse Cramer's hostility toward Yossarian is consistent and personal. She is one of the ward nurses who does not like him, and she sizzles with sanctimonious anger like a damp firecracker when she encounters him out of bed after his leg wound. When he refuses to obey her order to get back into bed, she blocks his path so he cannot comply, and when he says "Screw" to her, she cracks him in the face so hard she almost knocks him down. Yossarian draws back his fist to punch her in the jaw just as his leg buckles and he begins to fall.
Her disapproval extends to Nurse Duckett, her best friend, after Duckett begins a liaison with Yossarian. Nurse Cramer stops speaking to Nurse Duckett because of the affair, yet she still goes everywhere with Duckett, maintaining a rigid ten-yard distance and snubbing her even in the water when they swim. She sits haughtily by herself on the beach, her back rigid and a ring of reflected sunlight burnishing her light-blond hair like a halo, prepared to begin talking to Duckett again only if she repents and apologizes. Duckett, however, prefers things as they are, having long wanted to give Nurse Cramer a rap to make her shut up.
Narrative Significance
Nurse Cramer functions as a figure of moral hypocrisy and bureaucratic callousness. Her sentimental tears for the Soldier in White are directed at a patient she treats as a housekeeping object, polishing his glass jars and brushing his bandages while having no idea whether anyone is even inside the plaster. Her virtuous indignation at Yossarian's insubordination is matched only by her inability to maintain order when real chaos erupts. She represents the institutional cruelty that operates through the mechanical performance of duty, a cruelty that Yossarian and Dunbar recognize as murder when she reads the thermometer that confirms the Soldier in White's death. Her prudish hostility toward Yossarian and her silent, punitive treatment of her best friend further mark her as a figure whose moral certainties are both shallow and destructive.
