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We speak student!

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Catch-22

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a la Shmoop

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Double Trouble

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So doubles are everywhere in Catch-22. In the title.

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What role does doubling have?

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And I'm thinking a little bit about

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one little silly trivia thing.

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The most popular grocery store item in 1961

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was what? You wanna guess?

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Doublemint chewing gum.

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- Oh, no way. Remember those commercials? - So there was something... Yeah.

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Double your trouble, double your fun.

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Something or other, Doublemint gum.

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There was a fascination with twins.

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And if you look at television commercials

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in the early 60s era,

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tons of twins. And the brand was your twin.

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I think that was the subtext.

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- But talk about how doubles play out in Catch-22. - It's funny that

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you mention that, because --

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I'm picturing the commercial with the two women and whatever.

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And that's part of what Heller does to double

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is all the women in the book are introduced in pairs.

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They're introduced in twos.

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But what the doubling does

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is it really reinforces

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the redundancy and circularity.

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What the doubling does is it really reinforces

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the redundancy and circularity

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of the administrative system that Heller is critiquing.

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So he's kind of just trying to shine a light

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on this bureaucracy in showing how everything

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is really circular and there's too much

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redundancy, right? Why have two when you can have one?

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And showing how this administrative system just isn't working the way it should be.

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So Yossarian kind of pretends to have

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this disease - This is another one of his crazy antics -

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He pretends to have a disease where he sees everything twice.

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So this constant reminder of doubling and things coming in twos --

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- Catch-22, work out that that was the title. World War II. - World War II.

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the idea is

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that this is just how bureaucracy works;

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that everything is doubled when it shouldn't be.

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There's two of everything when there shouldn't be.

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And it's a circularity that really isn't progressing us anywhere.

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Why did Heller use so much doubling in Catch-22?

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Why did Heller use so much doubling in Catch-22? [ chuckles ]

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[ boing ]

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