As much as I liked listening to Catch-22 on an audio book, there was something significant about the book that bothered me.
In the book, anybody with authority was depicted as a self-aggrandizing buffoon. The officers who commanded the lives of the men in Yossarian's group were stupid, self-serving incompetents. They enforced their control over the men with the Army's rules and punishments. Their real mission was their own advancement. They were impossibly (and hilariously) greedy, egotistical, and ambitious.
But eventually the officers became more than just funny caricatures. They were evil. They blithely sent their men to their deaths. They threatened and persecuted the kind-hearted ineffectual chaplain. They ignored the crimes of a murderer and rapist, but arrested Yossarian for going AWOL and becoming a malcontent.
Heller seemed to say that authority itself was evil, at least, all authority in the fictional world of the novel. At some point, the endless satire became too much for me. I didn't like the book's relentless attack on all authority.
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