How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
Thanksgiving Day came and went without any fuss while Yossarian was still in the hospital […]. It was the most rational Thanksgiving he had ever spent, and he took a sacred oath to spend every future Thanksgiving Day in the cloistered shelter of a hospital. He broke his sacred oath the very next year […]. (18.24)
Again, promises – words of obligation – mean nothing. Yossarian breaks his without a thought.
Quote #8
[…] he sat right back down behind his desk and made a cryptic notation on his memorandum pad to look into the whole suspicious business of the Yossarians right away. He wrote his reminder to himself in a heavy and decisive hand, amplifying it sharply with a series of coded punctuation marks and underlining the whole message twice, so that it read:
Yossarian!!!(?)!
The colonel sat back when he had finished and was extremely pleased with himself for the prompt action he had just taken to meet this sinister crisis. (21.4-6)
The Colonel's writing is ineffective. It does nothing to help his problematic situation with Yossarian. The fact that the Colonel takes his message to be effective is a sign of his own stupidity.
Quote #9
Yossarian – the very sight of the name made him shudder. There were so many esses in it. It just had to be subversive. It was like the word subversive itself. It was like seditious and insidious too, and like socialist, suspicious, fascist and Communist. (21.6)
Language, again, proves to be unfaithful here. Just because Cathcart plays sound association, he thinks that the English language is providing him with truth. In reality, none of it is true.