| Term | Definition |
|---|
| Catch-22 (Author?) | Joseph Heller |
| Slaughterhouse-Five (Author?) | Kurt Vonnegut |
| Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Author?) | Edward Albee |
| The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World | Gabriel Garcia Marquez |
| Death Beyond Constant Love (Author?) | Gabriel Garcia Marquez |
| The Garden of Forking Paths (Author?) | Jorge Luis Borges |
| Louis Althusser | Marxist philosopher. Murdered wife. Advocate of modern structuralism. Developed concept of Idealogical State Apparatuses (ISAs). |
| Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA) | Althusser. All ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects. Ideologies interpellate willing people into defined subject positions through this. |
| Doppelgangers | A double in any sense or a ghostly double of a living person that haunts its living counterpart. (Samuel Beckett, Heller's characters, repitition, redundancy, overkill) |
| Trauma & Repression | Catch-22/Slaughterhouse-Five make the effort to recover memory that is central to their narrative structures (Snowden/Tralfamadorians). |
| Labyrinths | Maze. "Mise en abyme." In Borges "The Garden of Forking Paths" it's inside the book/time. The layers of text form one. |
| Jacques Derrida | French philosopher and founder of deconstruction. |
| Differance | Derridean theory. It plays on the fact that the French word différer means both "to defer" and "to differ." |
| Mise en abyme | Derrida. Placed in the abyss. Think of standing between two mirrors. It's a type of frame story, in which the core narrative can be used to illuminate some aspect of the framing story. The term is used in deconstruction and deconstructive literary criticism as a paradigm of the intertextual nature of language—that is, of the way language never quite reaches the foundation of reality because it refers in a frame-within-a-frame way to other language, which refers to other language, etc. |
| Presence becomes Absence | Derrida. "There is nothing outside the text" or "il n'y a pas de hors-texte." Without an outside of language, meaning can never be completely present. Rather we are separated from signification by the necessitated absence of linguistic forms. Representational absence becomes a form of presence. |
| Jacques Lacan | French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist |
| Mirror stage | Lacan proposes that human infants pass through a stage in which an external image of the body (reflected in a mirror, or represented to the infant through the mother or primary caregiver) produces a psychic response that gives rise to the mental representation of an "I". The infant identifies with the image, which serves as a gestalt of the infant's emerging perceptions of selfhood, but because the image of a unified body does not correspond with the underdeveloped infant's physical vulnerability and weakness, this imago is established as an Ideal-I toward which the subject will perpetually strive throughout his or her life. |
| Fragmented self | In Lacan's presentation of the mirror stage, the infant experiences his or her body as uncoordinated, vulnerable, and insufficient. This sense of frustration with physical limitations propels the infant toward identificaiton with the (apparently) unified and stable imago of the mirror reflection or of the caregiver. The "I" that forms as a result of this identification continues to be haunted by the contrary image of this concept, or of the fundamental vulnerability of the body, which crops up in dreams of losing body parts (such as teeth) or of suffering mutilating injuries. Lacan mentions the Renaissance painter Hieronymus Bosch in connection with this concept; Bosch's paintings depict a variety of pierced, wounded, and dismembered human figures. |
| Nom/non du pere | If the castration complex is to normalise the child, Lacan argues, what the child must be made to perceive is that what satisfies or orders the desire of the mother is not any visible (imaginary) feature of the father (his obviously better physical endowments, and so on). The child must come to see that the whims of the mother are themselves ordered by a Law that exceeds and tames them. This law is what Lacan famously dubs the name (nom) of the father, trading on a felicitous homonymy in French between nom (name) and non (the 'no!' to incestuous union). When the father intervenes, (at least when he is what Lacan calls the symbolic father) Lacan's argument is that he does so less as a living enjoying individual than as the delegate and spokesperson of a body of social Law and convention that is also recognized by the mother, as a socialized being, to be decisive. |
| Michel Foucault | A French historian and philosopher, associated with the structuralist and post-structuralist movements. He has had wide influence not only (or even primarily) in philosophy but also in a wide range of humanistic and social scientific disciplines. |
| Foucault & Discourse | "An entity of sequences of signs in that they are enouncements (enoncés)." An enouncement (often translated as "statement") is not a unity of signs, but an abstract matter that enables signs to assign specific repeatable relations to objects, subjects and other enouncements. Thus, this term constitutes sequences of such relations to objects, subjects and other enouncements. A discursive formation is defined as the regularities that produces such discourses. Foucault used the concept of discursive formation in relation to his analysis of large bodies of knowledge, such as political economy and natural history. |
| Sigmund Freud | Physiologist, medical doctor, psychologist and father of psychoanalysis. He elaborated the theory that the mind is a complex energy-system, the structural investigation of which is proper province of psychology. He articulated and refined the concepts of the unconscious, of infantile sexuality, of repression, and proposed a tripartite account of the mind's structure, all as part of a radically new conceptual and therapeutic frame of reference for the understanding of human psychological development and the treatment of abnormal mental conditions. |
| Oedipus complex | Freuidian. A deep sexual attraction for the mother, and a hatred of the father. This, however, gives rise to (socially derived) feelings of guilt in the child, who recognizes that it can never supplant the father. It also puts the child at risk, which he perceives – if he persists in pursuing the sexual attraction for his mother, he may be harmed by the father; specifically, he comes to fear that he may be castrated. This is termed 'castration anxiety'. Both the attraction for the mother and the hatred are usually repressed, and the child usually resolves the conflict of the complex by coming to identify with the father. |
| Electra complex | Term coined by Carl Jung. According to Freud, a girl, like a boy, is originally attached to the mother figure. However, during the phallic stage, when she discovers that she lacks a penis, she becomes libidinally attached to the father figure, and imagines that she will become pregnant by him, all the while becoming more hostile toward her mother. Freud attributes the character of this developmental stage in girls to the idea of "penis envy", where a girl is envious of the male penis. According to the theory, this penis envy leads to resentment towards the mother figure, who is believed to have caused the girl's "castration." The hostility towards the mother is then later revoked for fear of losing the mother's love, and the mother becomes internalized, much the same as the Oedipus complex. |
| Karl Marx | German philosopher, economist, and revolutionary. With the help and support of Friedrich Engels he wrote The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Das Kapital (1867-1894). These works explain historical development in terms of the interaction of contradictory economic forces, form the basis of all communist theory, and have had a profound influence on the social sciences. |
| Imaginary economic relations. | Idea of Marx. Žižek calls for a "radical re-politicization of the economy." Žižek is critical of the way political decisions are justified; the way, for example, reductions in social programs are sometimes presented as an apparently 'objective' necessity, though this is no longer a valid basis for political discourse. |
| Palimpsest | Writing material (as a parchment or tablet) used one or more times after earlier writing has been erased. Something having usually diverse layers or aspects apparent beneath the surface. |
| Reversal in Catch-22 | Used as a stylistic feature of negation in Catch-22 according to Downing. Definition: a negative proposition which defeats an expectation expressed either explicitly or implicitly in previous discourse and which a)forms part of a contradictory structure, b) modifies assumed cultural patterns of experience, and c) creates a humorous effect. |
| Pianosa | Setting of Catch-22. An island, near the Italian coast in the Mediterranean Sea. |
| McWatt | A cheerful, polite pilot who often flies Yossarian's planes. He likes to joke around with Yossarian and sometimes buzzes the squadron. |
| Major Major Major Major | The supremely mediocre squadron commander. He is promoted to major on his first day in the army by a mischievous computer. He is painfully awkward and will see people in his office only when he is not there. His promotion to squadron commander distances him from the other soldiers, reducing him to loneliness. |
| John Yossarian | The protagonist and hero of the novel. He is a captain in the Air Force and a lead bombardier in his squadron, but he hates the war. His powerful desire to live has led him to the conclusion that millions of people are trying to kill him, and he has decided either to live forever or, ironically, die trying. |
| Ex-PFC Wintergreen | The mail clerk at the Twenty-seventh Air Force Headquarters, he is able to intercept and forge documents and thus wields enormous power in the Air Force. He continually goes AWOL (Absent Without Leave) and is continually punished with loss of rank. |
| Milo Minderbinder | A fantastically powerful mess officer, He controls an international black-market syndicate and is revered in obscure corners all over the world. He ruthlessly chases after profit and bombs his own men as part of a contract with Germany. He insists that everyone in the squadron will benefit from being part of the syndicate and that "everyone has a share." He also takes his job as mess officer very, very seriously; as a result, the troops in Yossarian's division eat better than any others. |
| Chief White Halfoat | An alcoholic Native American from Oklahoma who has decided to die of pneumonia. |
| Doc Daneeka | The medical officer. He feels very sorry for himself because the war has interrupted his lucrative private practice in the United States, and he refuses to listen to other people's problems. He is the first person to explain Catch-22 to Yossarian. |
| Chaplain Albert Taylor Tappman | A friend of Yossarian. Timid and thoughtful, he is haunted by a sensation of déjà vu (the feeling of having seen or experienced a particular thing before) and begins to lose his faith in God as the novel progresses. |
| Corporal Whitcomb | The chaplain's atheist assistant, and later a sergeant. He hates the chaplain for holding back his career and makes the chaplain a suspect in the Washington Irving scandal. |
| The Soldier in White | A body completely covered with bandages in Yossarian and Dunbar's ward in the Pianosa hospital. The body terrifies the men. |
| The Soldier Who Saw Everything Twice | After his death, Yossarian fakes as him for his parents' visit. |
| A. Foritori | Hospital patient. If x is true, then so much more must y be true. |
| Dunbar | A friend of Yossarian and the only other person who seems to understand that there is a war going on. He has decided to live as long as possible by making time pass as slowly as possible, so he treasures boredom and discomfort. |
| Hungry Joe | An unhinged member of Yossarian's squadron. A former photographer for Life magazine, he is obsessed with photographing naked women. He has horrible nightmares on nights when he is not scheduled to fly a combat mission the next morning. |
| Huple/Cat | A fifteen-year-old pilot who was flying the mission to Avignon on which Snowden was killed. He is Hungry Joe's roommate; his cat likes to sleep on Hungry Joe's face. |
| General Peckem | The ambitious special operations general who plots incessantly to take over General Dreedle's position. |
| Colonel Cathcart | The ambitious, unintelligent officer in charge of Yossarian's squadron. He wants to be a general, and he tries to impress his superiors by bravely volunteering his men for dangerous combat duty whenever he gets the chance. As he tries to scheme his way ahead, he considers successful actions "feathers in his cap" and unsuccessful ones "black eyes." |
| General Dreedle | A grumpy old general in charge of the wing in which Yossarian's squadron is placed. He is the victim of a private war waged against him by the ambitious General Peckem. |
| Colonel Moodus | General Dreedle's son-in-law. General Dreedle despises him and enjoys watching Chief White Halfoat bust him in the nose. |
| Lt/Col/General Scheisskopf | Later a colonel and eventually a general. He, whose name is German for "shithead," helps train Yossarian's squadron in America and shows an unsettling passion for elaborate military parades. |
| Dobbs | A co-pilot, he seizes the controls from Huple during the mission to Avignon, the same mission on which Snowden died. |
| Aarfy | Yossarian's navigator, even though he gets lost wherever he goes. He infuriates Yossarian by pretending that he cannot hear Yossarian's orders during bombing runs. |
| Captain Black | The squadron's bitter intelligence officer. He wants nothing more than to be squadron commander. He exults in the men's discomfort and does everything he can to increase it; when Nately falls in love with a whore in Rome, he begins to buy her services regularly just to taunt him. Pioneers loyalty oath movement. |
| Clevinger | An idealistic member of Yossarian's squadron. He firmly believes in such concepts as country, loyalty, and duty, and argues about them with Yossarian. |
| Major --- de Coverly | The fierce, intense executive officer of the squadron. He is revered and feared by the men. They are afraid to ask his first name, even though all he does is play horseshoes and rent apartments for the officers in cities taken by American forces. |
| Dori Duz | The attractive friend of Lieutenant Scheisskopf's wife. |
| Lieutenant Scheisskopf's wife | The lieutenant's wife and the lover of all the men in her husband's squadron, including Yossarian, with whom she debates about God. |
| Luciana | A beautiful girl Yossarian meets, sleeps with, and falls in love with during a brief period in Rome. |
| Flume | Chief White Halfoat's old roommate, who is so afraid of having his throat slit while he sleeps that he has taken to living in the forest. |
| Havermeyer | A fearless lead bombardier. He never takes evasive action, and he enjoys shooting field mice at night. |
| Lieutenant Colonel Korn | Colonel Cathcart's wily, cynical sidekick. |
| Orr | Yossarian's often-maddening roommate. He is a gifted fix-it man who is always constructing little improvements to the tent that he shares with Yossarian. He almost always crashes his plane or is shot down on combat missions, but he always manages to survive. |
| Nately's whore's kid sister | The younger sister |
| Kid Sampson | A pilot in the squadron. |
| Mudd | Generally referred to as "the dead man in Yossarian's tent," he was a squadron member who was killed in action before he could be processed as an official member of the squadron. As a result, he is listed as never having arrived, and no one has the authority to move his belongings out of Yossarian's tent. |
| Nately | A good-natured nineteen-year-old boy in Yossarian's squadron. He, who comes from a wealthy home, falls in love with a whore in Rome and generally tries to keep Yossarian from getting into trouble. |
| Nately's whore | The beautiful whore with whom Nately falls in love in Rome. |
| The lecherous Old Man | Man who lives in the brothel |
| Phantasmagoria | A shifting series or succession of things seen or imagined. Rome--bombed out city. |
| The syndicate | Black-market operation run by Milo Minderbinder. |
| Snowden | The young gunner whose death over Avignon shattered Yossarian's courage and caused him to experience the shock of war. He died in Yossarian's arms with his entrails splattered all over Yossarian's uniform, a trauma that is gradually revealed over the course of the novel. |
| Bologna/bomb map | Yossarin moved the bomb line to evade this dangerous mission. |
| Yu Tsun | He is a Chinese professor living in England during World War I. He is also a German spy. He takes on the role of narrator of The Garden of Forking Paths as the original narrator provides his statement to the reader. He is also the great-grandson of a Chinese writer, Ts'ui Pen, whose goal it was to write a huge novel and a build a great labyrinth. |
| Ts'ui Pen | Chinese philosopher. Wanted to construct a labyrinth. Author of the book in the story that comments on time. |
| Stephen Albert | He is a noted sinologist, or student of Chinese language and culture. A former missionary in China, he is a student of the works of Yu Tsun's ancestor. Indeed, he has solved the mystery of the missing labyrinth, revealing that the novel of Ts'ui Pen is the labyrinth itself. |
| Richard Madden | An Irishman who works for English intelligence. After he kills Yu Tsun's contact, Viktor Runeberg, he stalks Yu Tsun to prevent him from passing along the information. Yu Tsun characterizes him as "a man accused of laxity and perhaps of treason." He tracks Yu Tsun to Albert's house, and arrests him for the murder. |
| Liddell Hart | Author of history book. |
| H'si Peng | The name of one of the consuls who is on Dr. Yu Tsun's side. "Steven Albert" mistakes Yu Tsun for this man when he answers the door. |
| "Swarming sensation" | Feeling described by Yu Tsun in The Garden of Forking Paths when he talks about his grandfather's book with Dr. Stephen Albert and considers time/infiniteness of persons. |
| Labyrinths | Garden/Time/Book in The Garden of Forking Paths |
| Lost in the Funhouse (Author?) | John Barth |
| Billy Pilgrim | A World War II veteran, POW survivor of the firebombing of Dresden, prospering optometrist, husband, and father. He is the protagonist of Slaughterhouse-Five who believes he has "come unstuck in time." He walks through a door at one moment in his life and suddenly finds himself in another time and place. His fragmented experience of time structures the novel as short episodic vignettes and shows how the difficulty of recounting traumatic experiences can require unusual literary techniques. |
| Valencia Merble | Billy's pleasant, fat wife who loves him dearly. She and Billy share a well-appointed home and have two children together, but Billy consistently distances himself from his family. |
| Paul Lazzaro | Another POW and the man responsible for Billy's death. He, a revenge-loving ruffian with criminal tendencies, arranges for Billy's assassination to avenge Roland Weary's death. His determination to kill Billy does not create a conflict between the two characters, however; because Billy has accepted the Tralfamadorians' conception of nonlinear time, he is unconcerned by his death. |
| Roland Weary | A stupid, cruel soldier taken prisoner by the Germans along with Billy. Unlike Billy, who is totally out of place in the war, he is a deluded glory-seeker who fancies himself part of the Three Musketeers and saves Billy's life out of a desire to be heroic. |
| Edgar Derby | Another survivor of Dresden's incineration. Following the firebombing, he is sentenced to die by firing squad for plundering a teapot from the wreckage. His death is anticlimactic, since Billy does not view it with any sense of pathos, but rather as an inevitability. |
| Blue Fairy Godmother | He is an English soldier who works at the pseudo-hospital in the camp for the prisoners of war. He is called the this name because that was his role in the Cinderella musical that the Englishmen put on for the Americans to welcome them. |
| Kilgore Trout | A bitter, unappreciated author of several cleverly ironic science-fiction novels that have a great influence on Billy. This man, who appears in many of Vonnegut's works, functions as Vonnegut's alter ego. |
| Tralfamadorians | Aliens shaped like toilet plungers, each with one hand containing an eye in its palm. Their philosophies of time and death influence the narrative style of the novel. They perceive time as an assemblage of moments existing simultaneously rather than as a linear progression, and the episodic nature of Slaughterhouse-Five reflects this notion of time. Their acceptance of death, which Billy embraces, leads the narrator to remark simply "So it goes" at each mention of death. |
| Montana Wildhack | A nubile young actress who is kidnapped by the Tralfamadorians to be Billy's mate inside the zoo. Billy wins her trust and love, and fathers a child by her in Tralfamadore. But Billy likely is delusional about his experiences with her, whose presence may have been imaginatively triggered by a visit to an adult bookstore in Times Square, where he sees her videos and a headline claiming to reveal her fate. |
| Wild Bob from Cody, Wyoming | An army colonel in the German rail yard who has lost his mind. He asks if Billy belongs to his regiment when, in fact, all his men are dead. He invites everyone to visit him in Wyoming, but his arbitrary death shows how the war makes such gestures both poignant and pointless. |
| Bernard V. O'Hare | A wartime pal of Vonnegut. He appears when Vonnegut visits him and his wife in Pennsylvania while trying to do research and collect remembrances for his Dresden book. Like his wife, Mary, and Vonnegut himself, this man, a nonfictional character, helps ground Slaughterhouse-Five in reality. Vonnegut actually has this other survivor of the firebombing contribute to the research and recollection process involved in creating the book, which allows us to take the novelistic details as fact and appreciate the thoughtful manner in which they are presented. |
| Mary O'Hare | Bernhard O'Hare's wife. She gets upset with Vonnegut because she believes that he will glorify war in his novel; Vonnegut, however, promises not to do so. Slaughterhouse-Five is a condemnation of war, and Vonnegut's decision to dedicate the novel in part to her suggests how deeply he agrees with her that the ugly truth about war must be told. |
| Children's crusade | Mary O'Hare believes WWII was this. Based on idea of 1212 crusade. |
| The F.E.B.S. | "Four eyed bastards." A barbershop quartet of optometrists. |
| Howard W. Campbell, Jr. | An American who has become a Nazi. He speaks to the prisoners in the slaughterhouse and tries to recruit them for "The Free American Corps," a German army unit that he is forming to fight the Russians. He represents all that is wrong with war; he desires to use people for perverse ideological ends. |
| Werner Gluck | A young German guard at the slaughterhouse. He gets his first glimpse of a naked woman along with Billy. Their shared intrigue and interest in the naked female body unites these two men from different sides, reflecting how fundamentally human feelings—such as lust—can trump differences of political ideology. |
| Roses and mustard gas | Smell of destroyed Dresden/Vonnegut's breath |
| Bertram Copeland Rumford | A Harvard history professor and the official U.S. Air Force historian who is laid up by a skiing accident in the same Vermont hospital as Billy after his plane crash. His reluctance to believe that Billy was present during the Dresden raid embodies the bureaucratic attitude that seeks to glorify the war and its heroes instead of realistically portraying war's destructiveness and its haphazard selection of survivors. |
| Cat's Cradle (Author?) | Kurt Vonnegut |
| Ice-nine | A crystalline form of water so stable that in practical terms it would never melt. |
| George | A 46-year-old member of the history department at New Carthage University. He is married to Martha, in a once loving relationship now defined by sarcasm and frequent acrimony. |
| Martha | She is the 52-year-old daughter of the president of New Carthage University. She is married to George, though disappointed with his aborted academic career. She attempts to have an affair with Nick. |
| Nick | He has just become a new member of the biology faculty at New Carthage University. He is 28 years old, good-looking, Midwestern, and clean-cut. He is married to Honey. |
| Honey | She is the petite, bland wife of Nick. She is 26 years old, has a weak stomach, and is not the brightest bulb of the bunch. |
| Walpurgisnacht | This German word refers to the night before May Day (the first day of May) when witches are supposed to meet together and create havoc. Anything called by this name is supposed to have a nightmarish quality. This term relates to the second act of Albee's play because the games among the guests escalate to a frightening level. In addition, since this is a pagan myth, Albee uses it to show the breakdown of modern civilization. Conservative, modern ideas, like church and family, are all collapsing in this act. |
| Hysterical pregnancy | Nick's reason for marrying Honey. False alarm. |
| The little bugger | George and Martha's "Son" |
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