The satire in Catch-22 and Good as GoldJoseph Heller, perhaps one of the most famous writers of the 20th century, writes about some emotional issues such as war. He doesn't address these issues in the normal way, but criticizes them and the institutions that help carry these things forward. In fact, Heller goes beyond criticism, he satirizes. In his two main novels Catch-22 and Good as Gold he satirizes almost every respectable American institution. Catch-22 is a satire on World War II. This novel is set on the small island of Pianosa in the Mediterranean Sea at the end of the war, when Germany no longer poses a threat. It is the struggle of one man, Yossarian, to survive the war. Throughout this novel Yossarian tries to escape the war, and does many inappropriate things to do so. Good as Gold is about a Jewish man named Gold. It concerns Gold's experiences with government while employed at the White House. It also deals in detail with Gold's family problems and Gold's struggle to write a book about contemporary Jewish society. In these two novels, Catch-22 and Good as Gold, Heller criticizes many institutions. In Good as Gold it is the White House and the government as a whole, and in Catch-22 it is the military and medical institutions. In Catch-22 the army is heavily satirized. Heller does this by criticizing it. Karl agrees with this statement by offering an example of the satire of both military and civilian institutions in Catch-22: The Influence of Postal Worker Wintergreen, the computer failure that promotes Major Major, and the petty rivalries among the officers Communication satirizes the failures and cutthroat competition that Heller saw within the civilian and military bureaucracies of the 1950s. Even the civil rights movement, not yet widespread in the 1950s, is satirized in Colonel Cathcart's attitudes towards conscripts. (23) Karl summarizes the satire of the military this way: The enemy in Heller's book is not simply the chaos of war, but also the deadly and inhuman bureaucracy of the military-economic establishment which claims to be a brake on chaos while threatening humanity. life more insidiously than the battle itself. Heller also questions the necessity of death and carnage throughout the novel by asking whether it is really necessary.