The book I have chosen for my Culminating activity is Catch-22 written by Joseph Heller. The book is based around a Second World War Bombardier pilot named Yossarian, who is stationed at a military base on the island or Pianosa, just off the coast of Italy. As the book begins Yossarian is in the hospital at his army base, fabricating a liver disease which the army doctors can neither discover the illness nor cure him.
             Yossarian was in the hospital for one reason, he was under the impression that millions of people were out to kill him, and when he was in the hospital he was relieved from combat duty, which made him safe from the people trying to kill him. Yossarian strongly opposed the war and felt that it was a waste of innocent human lives.
             Yossarian was always trying to get sent home so that he would not have to fight anymore. Each solider at Pianosa was required to fly a specific number of combat missions, when the solider had completed his required number of combat missions, he could apply to be sent home. There was a problem with this method, every time a solider had finished enough missions to be sent home, Colonel Cathcart, the commanding officer at Pianosa, would raise the number of combat missions each man had to fly.
             Colonel Cathcart is the antagonist of the story, volunteering his men for the most dangerous of combat missions, and never letting any of the men return home. Colonel Cathcart is the type of person who would risk the lives of hundreds of innocent men, only so he could be promoted, and referred to as 'General Cathcart.' With Colonel Cathcart standing in his way, Yossarian's one goal, to be sent home, is repeatedly denied which leads Yossarian to other methods of trying to be sent home.
             Yossarian discovers early in the novel from Doc Daneeka, a hypochondriacal Doctor, that anyone who is crazy doesn't have to fly missions and all he had to do was
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