Language and the system : the closed world of Joseph Heller's fiction

This is a study of the use of language in Joseph Heller's novels Catch-22, Something Happened, Good as Gold, God Knows and Picture This. Heller's fiction is characterized by self-negating sentences and logic, a repetitive story line and circular structure. Each novel concerns the relationship between people and language, but the relationship invariably is circular and inherently non-progressive. The separation between people and language, analogous to the separation between existence and expression, is the basis for Heller's thematics.Joseph Heller is a novelist who writes about language. Heller's novels all contain or evoke a common system characterized by self-containment and self-reference. In this system, language and literature are self-referential. It is implicit within Heller's writing that literature is a self-contained, non-progressive system, and consequently, it cannot yield a conclusive resolution. The self-contained system of his novels becomes analogous for literature, language, and finally knowledge. Definitive knowledge, being a derivative of language, is impossible. Eventually, Heller's fiction allows no final resolution because of the inconclusive nature of language itself