Yossarian and Hungry Joe

Yossarian and Hungry Joe are bound by a strange, inverted kinship that neither fully understands. Hungry Joe, a jumpy, emaciated wreck of a man who has flown six combat tours of duty, suffers ear-splitting nightmares every night he spends in the squadron not flying missions. When he is on combat duty, the nightmares stop and he settles into a normal state of terror with a smile of relief. Yossarian reads Hungry Joe's shrunken face like a headline: it is good when Hungry Joe looks bad and terrible when Hungry Joe looks good. Hungry Joe denies the whole thing stubbornly, insisting he does not have nightmares, and when Yossarian advises him to see Doc Daneeka, Hungry Joe replies, "Why should I go see Doc Daneeka? I'm not sick." Yossarian does everything he can to help him, but Hungry Joe just won't listen because he thinks Yossarian is crazy.

Life and Plot Trajectory

Hungry Joe's life is a cycle of hope and collapse. Each time he finishes a tour of duty, he packs his bags, writes happy letters home, and gives a big party for his friends, laughing, singing, and drinking until he recedes peacefully into slumber. As soon as Yossarian, Nately, and Dunbar put him to bed, he begins screaming in his sleep. In the morning he steps from his tent looking haggard, fearful, and guilt-ridden, an eaten shell of a human building rocking perilously on the brink of collapse. The nightmares appear with celestial punctuality every single night he spends in the squadron when he is not flying combat missions and is waiting for the orders sending him home that never come. Every time Colonel Cathcart increases the number of missions and returns Hungry Joe to combat duty, the nightmares stop. Yossarian grabs Hungry Joe by the neck and makes him fly them both to see ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen when he learns the missions have been raised to fifty-five. Hungry Joe's response to women is one of frenzied worship and idolatry; he is always trying to take pictures of naked girls with his intricate black camera, but the pictures never come out because he forgets to put film in the camera or turn on lights or remove the cover from the lens opening.

Key Actions and Objectives

Hungry Joe's primary objective is survival and escape from combat, but his methods are self-defeating. He flies the courier ship once a week, removing himself from the squadron for four nights, a remedy devised by Colonel Korn that proves successful in stopping his nightmares temporarily. When he is not flying, he hounds Sergeant Towser humorously for the arrival of rotation orders, then begins hating him venomously when the orders do not come. He collects lists of fatal diseases and arranges them in alphabetical order so he can put his finger on any one he wants to worry about. He grows very upset whenever he misplaces some or cannot add to his list, and goes rushing in a cold sweat to Doc Daneeka for help. Yossarian advises Doc Daneeka to give him Ewing's tumor and follow it up with melanoma, noting that Hungry Joe likes lingering diseases but likes the fulminating ones even more. Hungry Joe's most dramatic action is his fist fight with Huple's cat, which he dreams is sleeping on his face, suffocating him. When he wakes up and the cat is actually there, his agony is terrifying: he lets out a piercing, unearthly howl that splits the moonlit dark. Yossarian intervenes, holding Hungry Joe and the cat apart by the scruffs of their necks, and declares a fair fight. The cat flees, and Hungry Joe is declared the winner, swaggering away happily with the proud smile of a champion.

Relationships and Conflict

Hungry Joe's relationship with Yossarian is one of mutual suspicion masked by grudging cooperation. Hungry Joe thinks Yossarian is crazy; Yossarian knows Hungry Joe is crazy. When Yossarian is in the hospital with a wounded leg, Hungry Joe comes to visit but is unwilling to share any dreams for Major Sanderson, the staff psychiatrist. He has nightmares because he has finished sixty missions and is waiting again to go home. Yossarian tries to warn him that Colonel Cathcart will only raise the missions again, but Hungry Joe insists, "I've got to wait and see what happens." When Yossarian refuses to fly more missions, Hungry Joe is one of the few people he smiles at, keeping his hand on his gun butt constantly. Hungry Joe's relationship with Huple, the fifteen-year-old pilot who lives in the same tent, is tense: Hungry Joe makes Huple roll his wrist watch up in a pair of wool socks every night and keep it on the bottom of his foot locker to stop the ticking from driving him crazy. Huple thrusts his jaw out defiantly and then does exactly as he has been told.

Change and Ending

Hungry Joe dies in his sleep while having a dream. They find a cat on his face. Yossarian, learning the news from the chaplain, begins to cry, hiding his tears in the crook of his shoulder. The death leaves Yossarian as the last of his friends alive, after Nately, Clevinger, Orr, Dobbs, Kid Sampson, and McWatt have all been killed. Yossarian realizes with a start that "they've got all my pals, haven't they? The only ones left are me and Hungry Joe." Then the chaplain tells him Hungry Joe is dead. Yossarian's grief is immediate and raw, a rare moment of unguarded emotion in a novel defined by irony and black humor. Hungry Joe's end is as absurd as his life: killed not by flak or a German fighter but by a cat in his sleep, a final, grotesque fulfillment of his recurring nightmare.

Thematic Significance

Hungry Joe embodies the novel's central paradox: the only safety is in danger, and the only peace is in war. His inverted responses—calm when flying combat missions, tormented when safe—mirror the Catch-22 logic that governs the entire system. He is a man driven mad by the hope of survival, unable to enjoy the respite he craves because the waiting itself is unbearable. His collection of fatal diseases and his obsession with photographing naked women are both desperate attempts to impose order on chaos, to capture and control what terrifies him. His death, with a cat on his face, is the novel's final joke on him: the thing he feared most in his dreams becomes the instrument of his end. Yossarian's tears for Hungry Joe are tears for himself, for the recognition that he is now truly alone, the last survivor of a circle of friends consumed by a war that makes no distinction between the brave and the cowardly, the sane and the mad.