The status of the white soldier

The Soldier in White is the most radical embodiment of dehumanization in Joseph Heller's Catch-22, a figure who transforms the human body into a purely mechanical system and forces the novel's characters—and its readers—to confront the terrifying possibility that the person inside may be nothing but an absence. He appears first in the hospital ward where Yossarian has taken refuge, smuggled in during the night, and is discovered by the other patients only when they wake to see "two strange legs hoisted from the hips, the two strange arms anchored up perpendicularly, all four limbs pinioned strangely in air by lead weights suspended darkly above him that never moved." He is constructed entirely of plaster, gauze, and a thermometer, with a "frayed black hole over his mouth" and a zinc pipe rising from the cement on his groin, coupled to a rubber hose that drains fluid into a jar on the floor. The same clear fluid is dripped back into him through a slit in the bandages over his elbow, the two jars simply switched when one is full and the other empty, so that the liquid circulates endlessly with "no apparent loss." He never speaks, never moves, and makes no sound. The only one who interacts with him is the good-natured Texan, who chats with him daily about more votes for decent folk, insisting he is "a real nice guy" and urging the others to introduce themselves. The rest of the men shrink from him with "tenderhearted aversion," gossiping in malicious undertones and sharing a common dread that he might begin moaning. The fighter pilot with the golden mustache articulates their fear: "I don't know what I'll do if he does begin moaning. It means he'll moan during the night, too, because he won't be able to tell time." The Soldier in White is kept spick-and-span by Nurse Duckett and Nurse Cramer, who brush his bandages with a whiskbroom, scrub his plaster casts with soapy water, wax a dim gloss on the zinc pipe, and polish the glass jars unceasingly. Nurse Cramer, in particular, is touched very deeply by him, her virtuous blue eyes flooding with leviathan tears on unexpected occasions, a sentimentality that enrages Yossarian. "How the hell do you know he's even in there?" he demands. "You don't even know if it's really him." Dunbar suggests helpfully, "Maybe there's no one inside. Maybe they just sent the bandages here for a joke." The Soldier in White dies when Nurse Cramer reads his thermometer and discovers he is dead. The Texan is blamed by Dunbar and Yossarian, who call him "Murderer" and "Killer," though the Texan protests he never touched him. The warrant officer on Yossarian's left is unimpressed by the entire incident. The Soldier in White returns later in the novel, appearing again in the hospital ward after the Thanksgiving celebration, and Dunbar screams and goes to pieces. "He's back!" he shouts. "It's the same one!" The ward erupts into bedlam, patients running and shouting, until doctors and M.P.s arrive to restore order. Dunbar leaps onto the bed and presses his eye against the black hole in the bandages, trying to see inside. The Soldier in White is then rolled away on a stretcher, and Nurse Duckett whispers to Yossarian that she has heard they are going to "disappear" Dunbar. The Soldier in White's ultimate significance is revealed not through any action of his own, but through the crisis he precipitates in others. He is the purest instance of what the novel calls "Snowden's secret": that man is matter, that the spirit gone, man is garbage. He is a living, breathing—or at least mechanically sustained—demonstration of the terrifying possibility that there is nothing inside but the biological machine, a possibility that Dunbar cannot bear and that Yossarian must learn to live with. The Soldier in White is not a character but a state: the state of being reduced to a thing, a process, a piece of equipment in the vast, indifferent machinery of war and bureaucracy. He is the ultimate expression of Catch-22's world, where the human is always in danger of being disappeared, replaced by a shell of bandages and tubes that continues to function long after the person—if there ever was one—has gone.