Yossarian wants to stop flying combat missions. This is, by any reasonable measure, a sane thing to want, given that people are trying to kill him. The catch — the famous one, the one that gave the language a phrase — is that asking to be grounded on the basis of insanity is itself proof of a rational mind at work, and therefore proof you are sane enough to keep flying. Every other escape route in the book works exactly the same way: perfectly logical, individually airtight, and collectively a trap with no exit.

The joke that stops being a joke

The first hundred pages read like pure farce — Milo Minderbinder's syndicate buying and selling everything including, eventually, bombing runs on his own airfield for a fee, officers scoring points off each other in a running war of petty administrative cruelty. It's very funny, and it is also, I noticed on this third pass through more clearly than ever, laying track for a much darker train. The repetitions that seem like comic tics on first read — the same scenes revisited from new angles, the same lines recurring — are actually a structure slowly revealing what really happened to a man named Snowden, one layer at a time, until the book makes you look directly at the thing it's been circling the whole time.

It gets less funny and more true on every reread, which I think is the highest compliment a satire can earn.— Prakhar Gautam

What holds up best, on a third reading, is how precisely the comedy is aimed. This isn't war-is-bad in the abstract; it's a specific indictment of the bureaucratic mind that survives any war by converting death into paperwork, and paperwork into an excuse to avoid ever being responsible for anything. Milo's profiteering plot, which could read as a cartoonish subplot, is the whole book's thesis running in miniature: give a system enough procedural cover and it will do absolutely anything, including betray the people it exists to protect.

It's not an easy read structurally — Heller jumps time and perspective without warning, and the first fifty pages ask you to trust that the chaos is deliberate before it starts paying you back. It always has, for me, three times now.