The Eternal City—Joseph Heller as Sadist

Abstract

The tonal unity of Keller's Catch-22 is broken by the grotesque elements of the chapter "The Eternal City". The author has distanced his protagonist and makes a personal statement which is misanthropic rather than making an absurd statement on the view of the world adopted by Yossarian. The result is that the absurdist genre is destroyed and replaced by a narrative that is sadistic in its basic attitude.