September

September in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 is the month when the last illusions of summer are stripped away and the novel’s atmosphere turns decisively toward cold, rot, and the relentless machinery of war. It is the season of the chaplain’s most desperate wandering, of Captain Flume’s spectral existence in the woods, and of the slow, inexorable decay that follows the deaths of Kid Sampson and McWatt. The month marks a threshold: the point at which the war’s absurdity hardens into something more sinister, and the faint hope of escape—embodied by Orr’s mysterious disappearance—begins to glimmer against the encroaching dark.

The Chaplain’s Encounter with Captain Flume

It is in September that the chaplain, fleeing his own humiliation at the hands of Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Korn, plunges into the forest and stumbles upon Captain Flume, the squadron’s public-relations officer who has been living as a fugitive in the woods. Flume, a tall, cadaverous figure with a hairy, tar-black mole under one nostril and a rough mustache the color of poplar bark, leaps out from behind a mulberry bush, and the chaplain screams in terror. Flume, in turn, shrieks, “Don’t hurt me!” The two men, each more frightened of the other than of the war itself, eventually establish a strange, halting dialogue. Flume explains that he has been living in the forest ever since Chief White Halfoat threatened to slit his throat from ear to ear while he slept. He sneaks into the mess hall through the back kitchen, where Milo gives him sandwiches and milk, and he keeps his belongings in his trailer, darting inside once or twice a day for a clean handkerchief or a change of underwear. When the chaplain asks what he will do when winter comes, Flume replies with a kind of martyred confidence: “Oh, I expect to be back in the squadron by then. Chief White Halfoat kept promising everyone that he was going to die of pneumonia, and I guess I’ll have to be patient until the weather turns a little colder and damper.” He then delivers a prophecy that the chaplain will later treasure as a cryptic, almost scriptural promise: “Tell them I’ll be back when winter comes.”

The Season of Rot and Waiting

September is also the month in which the physical and moral landscape of Pianosa begins to rot. The beautiful days are gone; the easy missions are over. Stinging rain and dull, chilling fog replace the summer sun, and the men fly at week-long intervals, whenever the weather clears. At night the wind moans, and the gnarled, stunted tree trunks creak and groan, forcing Yossarian’s thoughts each morning—even before he is fully awake—back to Kid Sampson’s skinny legs bloating and decaying in the icy rain and wet sand. The memory of Snowden freezing to death in the rear of the plane, spilling his secret all over the floor, haunts Yossarian with renewed intensity. He begins to call the roll of all the men, women, and children he has ever known who are now dead, and the number seems only to increase. The Germans are still fighting. Death, he suspects, is irreversible, and he begins to think he is going to lose.

The Chaplain’s Desperate Faith

For the chaplain, September becomes a month of testing and of fragile, almost irrational hope. After his encounter with Flume, he returns to his tent, where Corporal Whitcomb—now promoted to sergeant by Colonel Cathcart—gloats over the chaplain’s misery. The chaplain is summoned to Colonel Cathcart’s office, where he is berated for his lack of initiative and forced to accept the form-letter scheme that Whitcomb has devised. Yet even as he sinks into despair, the chaplain clings to the memory of Flume’s prophecy. He reflects on the naked man in the tree at Snowden’s funeral, on the strange, recurring sensations of déjà vu, and on the possibility that the cryptic promise—“Tell them I’ll be back when winter comes”—might be a sign of divine origin. He is not sure whether he is blessed or losing his mind, but the hope, however tenuous, keeps him from capitulating entirely. September thus becomes the month in which the chaplain’s faith is both shattered and, paradoxically, renewed, as he learns to persevere in the face of absurdity and cruelty.