Joseph Heller's voice in Catch-22 is satirical and comical. For example, in chapter 11 he writes, "The more loyalty oaths a person signed, the more loyal he was; to Captain Black it was as simple as that, and he had Corporal Kolodny sign hundreds with his name each day so that he could always probe he was more loyal than anyone else"(113). No person would ever think that they could prove themselves more loyal than someone else by signing hundreds of loyalty oaths and no one would actually sign hundreds of loyalty oaths either. People do sign loyalty oaths, but do they really mean anything? Does signing your name on a piece of paper prevent you in any way from acting against what you just signed? Joseph Heller is making fun of the idea that a signature has the power to keep someone loyal. His satirical voice comes out when he suggests with hyperbole that someone would sign hundreds of pieces of paper, and he uses it to criticize society's naïveté in thinking that a name of a piece of paper has any real power.
Heller's voice is not only satirical, but colloquial as well. His liberal use of commas and semicolons in the text demonstrates how he writes the way that people speak. Especially in dialog, the colloquial voice he uses is educated, yet familiar. It is evocative of the type of person who would use proper grammar, so someone who is older than a teenager, but someone who speaks with a modern tongue. The colloquial yet educated qualities of Heller's voice integrate well with the military atmosphere of his novel to create a consistent and appealing world.
Heller rarely breaks out of his satirical voice, even when making a serious comment on society such as when he writes, "Yossarian, on the other hand, knew exactly who Mudd was. Mudd was the unknown soldier who had never had a chance, for that was the only thing anyone ever did know about all the unknown soldiers
—they never had a chance. They had to be dead"(108). Even when discussing seriously how society sweeps the unfortunate under the rug, Heller has a satirical voice. The name "Mudd" when turned phonetically backward is "dumb". In this passage it represents how society looks down on the unfortunate as poor saps, blaming them as responsible for their own situations, when in reality people don't want to admit that those "Mudd"s could be them; other than not looking at them, people find false difference between themselves and the unfortunate in order to convince themselves that they will never end up with no money, no teeth, or dead. Heller's satirical tone is thusly very effective, allowing him to discuss serious topics with an audience that might otherwise stay away from thicker books.
