Wednesday, July 06, 2011
Catch 22 and Kafka's Metamorphosis
The "catch" in Joseph Heller's novel, Catch-22, was allegedly a clause in military regulations stating that anyone who realizes they are crazy cannot be that crazy. It is quite possible that actual sociopaths cannot grasp the fact that they are sociopaths. I watched a documentary where a sociopath in prison was interviewed. He had held up a number of banks at gunpoint. Repeatedly in the interview he was asked how is victims might have felt. He realized that part of the point of the interview was to assess him as somehow abnormal but he repeatedly rationalized all the reasons why his actions/feelings/perceptions are perfectly normal and he is just like everyone else. Supposedly, Franz Kafka's short story, "Metamorphosis," about a man who wakes up one morning to discover he is a large insect, is actually about someone who suddenly comes to some true realization of how they are different and alienated from society.
