Captain John Yossarian is the protagonist of Catch-22 and embodies many of the novel’s recurring themes. He has spent a long time as a bombardier in the United States Army Air Force, and now he wants no more part of the war. He therefore spends the novel searching for ways to escape the violent, bureaucratic hell of the military. Yossarian’s role as the protagonist is unconventional; rather than trying to resolve the conflict portrayed in the novel, he wants to escape it altogether. He has no interest in winning, only in surviving. Survival is his core ambition.

Yossarian believes that millions of people are trying to kill him. Superficially, this sounds like a paranoid delusion—and when he complains to his colleagues that these people, including people on his own side in the war, want him dead, his colleagues dismiss him and suggest he is “insane.” In the context of the war, however, Yossarian’s belief is terribly, horrifically “sane.” Enemy soldiers are ready to shoot at him whenever he is on missions, while his superior officers are untrustworthy and continually change the requirements for returning home. The Germans might be holding the guns, but Yossarian’s superiors are responsible for relentlessly endangering their men, even though the war is nearly over and nothing is ever accomplished.