A Psychological Interpretation of Hungry Joe’s Nightmares in Catch-22

HUANG Zhi-yan

（Guangzhou Institute of Technology,Guangzhou Guangdong 510075,China）

0 Introduction

Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 is a satirical novel that gained popular success.By using Catch 22 as a metaphor,it is highly acclaimed as an excellent novel of black humor.It explores the absurdity of World War II and protests against the absurdity of modern society.

1 Psychological Interpretation of Hungry Joe’s Nightmares

Hungry Joe is portrayed in detail in Chapter Six.At night,he often has bad dreams,and terror comes out in his screaming nightmares that awake and annoy his tent mates.

1.1 Hungry Joe’s Recurrent Nightmares

Catch-22 is a satire on the murderous insanity of war,and the reality of war in which Hungry Joe’s fears are magnified in horrible recurring nightmares.Hungry Joe,an unhinged pilot of Yossarian’s squadron,is afraid of tranquility,and has horrible nightmares on nights when he is not scheduled to fly a combat mission the next morning.He dies in his sleep towards the end of the novel.Initially,he has a common,logical train of thought,wishing to finish his combat missions in the war and return home,where his safety is guaranteed,and where he has no fear of being killed.His wing commander,Colonel Cathcart,continues to raise the number of required missions to fly for his wing in order to achieve his goal.

Hungry Joe’s fears are magnified in horrible recurring nightmares.He begins to be anxious and dreamy when he is not assigned a combat mission;his sleep becomes uneasy,and once almost every night it is interrupted by an acute attack of anxiety with hallucinations.From this dream,he wakes up in terror;and cries out.There arises within him a struggle for repression,which suppresses the libido and transforms it into anxiety,and this anxiety gathers up the punishments with which he was originally threatened.His ear-splitting nightmares keep the whole camp awake.(60)He goes to pieces each time he finishes flying the number of missionsthe Headquartersrequires,and recoversonly when the Headquarters raises the number of missions required,as it inevitably does,throwing him back on combat status.He has “inverted set of responses” (63).When he is assigned increasing number of missions,he looks normal and relieved;however,he looks awful and begins his nightmare when he is free from duty.He keeps on having nightmares and screams every night,although when he wakes up the next morning,he denies anything that has happened.(63)

Hungry Joe’s nightmares can explain what is troubling him inside.“He began screaming in his sleep.(62-63).He suffers from traumatic neurosis,so his nightmares have connection with his traumatic experience in the war.His nightmares are memories of past trauma.“After a severe trauma,the dominant emotions are obvious” (Dreams and Nightmares 7).“Terror and fear usually predominate.According to Freud,nightmare symbolizes the conflict between id and ego.In Joe’s nightmare,the id and the ego are fighting with each other.The confrontation bewilders him every night when he hasn’t a combat mission.His internal struggle goes on and on.He is stuck with repetitive posttraumatic nightmares,which are classically described as repeating the very earliest stages—picturing the trauma as it occurred.The nightmares most often actually repeat a slightly later stage of the process with an added element of survivor guilt(Hartmann 185).

When an emotionalconcern is appropriately worked on and understood,it no longer acts as a major force in the production of dreams.This relates to Jung’s notion of “compensation” in dreams.By this term,Jung implies that portions of the personality that are repressed or not significantly expressed in waking are the ones that appear in dreams.Therefore,Hungry Joe’s nightmares are a good way for him to release his sufferings and repressed emotions.In psychology,it’s a kind of catharsis.Freud notes that “dreams occurring in traumatic neuroses have the characteristics of repeatedly bringing the patient back into the situation of his accident,a situation from which he wakes up in another fright” (Beyond the Pleasure Principle 7).Thus,Hungry Joe’s repeated nightmares create a mood of delirium.He is a soldier in the field,but he starts to dream too much of war scenes which he has seen.

1.2 Hungry Joe’s Scream in His Nightmares

In Chapter Seven of The Interpretation of Dreams,Freud states that an anxiety dream arises when a repressed wish and the preconscious repudiation of that wish are not properly balanced and the unacceptable impulse comes too close to consciousness.Freud described an anxiety dream as a product of internal conflict and compromise.(Altman and Brenner)After the severe conflict inside,Hungry Joe awakes from his nightmare,and accepts the fact that he has to finish the missions.He makes compromise with Catch 22.

Hungry Joe lies screaming in his sleep every night.(33)His every nightmare is followed by his scream.In Hungry Joe’s dream,he has something better to do each time he finishes his missions.But whenever he is not assigned a mission,he has “ear-splitting nightmares” (60)because his wish to go home will not be fulfilled,and he has to stay in the front line again.This causes his anxiety and he can not have a normal state of mind when he has to take combat missions again and again.

2 Psychological Interpretation of the Factors Leading to Hungry Joe’s Nightmares

2.1 External Factors Leading to Hungry Joe’s Nightmares

2.1.1 Noises around Him

As Kellerman points out, “External factors would be any real environmental events which endanger the dreamer’s life,threaten the dreamer with bodily injury,or reverses in the dreamer’s life circumstances,etc”(Kellerman 8).

Hungry Joe is a hypersensitive person who is easily affected by the noises around him,which is a reverse in his life circumstances.He’s emotionally fragile,and easily affected by various environmental events.He can’t stand the repetitive sounds around,which get on his nerves.

Heller describes Hungry Joe’s detestation of small minute sounds.On the surface,Hungry Joe’s is irritated by small noises such as the ones Aarfy makes while sucking on his pipe,the ones that Orr makes tinkering,McWatt’s card snapping,and Dobb’s teeth chattering.The ticking of a watch also makes him miserable.Owing to the disturbance of these noises,he cannot have a good night’s sleep.

2.1.2 Colonel Cathcart’s Order to Increase the Number of Combat Missions

Hungry Joe is the most avid flyer,having more missions than any other person in the squadron.He has completed his number of required missions,but he has to wait for the order to go home which never comes.Every night when Hungry Joe goes to sleep he sees himself getting closer to home,but then ends up being pulled back by Colonel Cathcart’s order.So he begins to have shrieking nightmares.This shows he is actually a person of thin boundaries.Colonel Cathcart commands him to stay in the war till it ends although he wants to go home.Ironically,each time Cathcart increases the number of required combat missions and places Hungry Joe on combat duty,Joe stops having the nightmares,because he thinks that when he finishes his mission this time,he will complete the number of required missions,and then he will be able to go home.He is completely trapped in his own Catch 22.The desire of going home is so strong that he begins to have a mental struggle.His ego and superego are fighting each other fiercely.His waiting for the order of mission builds up huge stress or pressure which drives him mad.Consequently,he screams during his nightmare,feeling fidgety.

His nightmares indicate his psychological breakdown ultimately by his anxiety and uneasiness.While externalfactorsoften operate in conjunction with internal factors in contributing to nightmares,they are typically not sufficient determiners on their own(Kellerman 8).

2.2 Internal Factor Leading to Hungry Joe’s Nightmares

2.2.1 Hungry Joe’s Anxiety

Hungry Joe has his anxiety,which leads to his bad dream.This kind of dream is called “anxiety dream”(Kellerman 10).When a person has a nightmare,his id (his subconscious or unconscious level of mind)is a barrier keeping the ego from all the possible fantasies.When the unconscious id impulses preponderate or the ego’s defense is in an inferior position,anxiety dream is formed.

When a person has a nightmare,his brain is a battlefield.The two parties at war are the unconscious wishes of the id and the ego.They are like enemies.The ego is in a disadvantageous position because its strength is weak.So,it cannot defend itself and is defeated by the unconscious wishes.When it surrenders,“the threatening impulses begin to emerge into consciousness”(Kellerman 10).

So when Hungry Joe’desire to return home and his anxiety about being killed are repressed into his unconsciousness,which they find their way out through his nightmares.

Any intense threats to the ego’s integrative functions,whether from the external world,the instinctual drives,or the superego,which induces feeling of helplessness,may precipitate nightmares (Kellerman 12).Hungry Joe’s ego is overburdened by the threat of the increasing numbers of missions and the separation from his family members.His ego’s “defensive functions are diminished”.Thus,he is “prone to experience nightmares”(Kellerman 12).During his sleep,his ego inclines to be helpless because it’s deprived of external sources of comfort and support which might be provided by the waking state.The efficacy of his ego functions decreases during his sleep.When he is awake,his ego gives a signal to prevent the intensity of anxiety.When he is asleep,the signal given by his ego diminishes.Therefore,his anxiety in nightmares should be attributed to his ego.Once substantial anxiety has built up,he can do nothing but wake up.And screaming,shrieking,or squealing is his exclusive emotional outlet.

2.2.2 Hungry Joe’s Personality

The ego is the executor of one’s personality.Hartmann elaborates the organizing principle of “boundaries”,distinguishing people with thick boundaries from those with thin boundaries.He puts forward a division of people into two personality types：thick boundaries and thin boundaries(Hartmann 227-228).The people who have “thick boundaries” do not report dreaming much,aside from the repetitive nightmares(Dreams and Nightmares 51-52).

Hungry Joe is a person with thin boundaries,and he has tendency to experience nightmares.Heller describes Hungry Joe as “a jumpy,emaciated wretch with a fleshless face of dingy skin and bone and twitching veins squirming subcutaneously in the blackened hollows behind his eyes like severed sections of snake.It was a desolate,cratered face,sooty with care like an abandoned mining town”(63).He looks like“an eaten shell of a human building” (63).This description implies that Hungry Joe’s body boundary is thin.He is an extremely sensitive person.

2.3 Psychological Interpretation of the Factors Leading to Hungry Joe’s Nightmares

Hungry Joe’s screaming nightmares are caused by the anxiety he feels as a result of the external and internal factors.When he falls asleep he begins to have nightmares that reveal the novel’s underlying theme of“madness” or “insanity”.

Those who are involved in the brutal war suffer from mental trauma.Hungry Joe is afraid of being killed in the war,and that’s why he wishes to go home.But he has to stay in the front line as Catch 22 requires him to.As a result,his anxiety increases as he stays in an environment with a lot of noises around him that get on his nerves.He then develops all kinds of fantasies about what would happen on him,and this causes him to wake up screaming.

In this situation,his psychology is distorted.He no longer possesses the psychology that a normal person usually has.He has an inverted set of responses to combat.He seems at peace only while in combat.When he is assigned another missions,he looks normal and relieved;whereas when he is not,he looks awful and begins to have his nightmares.

Hungry Joe’s nightmares have a serious consequence.He died in his sleep while having a dream with a cat on his face.His death is a self-fulfilling prophecy.According to Freud’s theory,if one’s nightmares begin to occur while one is awake,if the breakdown of one’s defenses is frequent,if one’s anxiety or pain in mind cannot be mitigated,if the truth hidden by repression comes out before one’s conscious self in a manner one can neither disguise nor handle—then one is in crisis,or trauma.When the trauma accumulates to a certain extent,exceeds the limit of one’s endurance,death will find its access,and this is the case with Hungry Joe.

3 Conclusion

The psychological reason for Hungry Joe’s nightmares is intricate but clear：it is a combination of external and internal factors：the noises around him,Colonel Cathcart’s command of the increasing number of combat missions,and Hungry Joe’s own anxiety and personality.

In describing Hungry Joe’s nightmares,Heller seems to suggest the disillusionment of the American Dream.Through the portrayal of his recurrent nightmares,he presents us with a picture of modern society as a world full of nightmarish comedy of violence,bureaucracy,and paradoxical madness.The depiction of Hungry Joe’s nightmares also helps to reveal the novel’s theme that war is a dehumanizing machinery,in which people have to endure its horror and mental torture.Heller seems to suggest that the war is a nightmare,leaving them mentally insane.

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