Yossarian really had no doubt about Orr’s ability to survive. If fish could be caught with that silly fishing line, Orr would catch them, and if it was codfish he was after, then Orr would catch a codfish, even though no codfish had ever been caught in those waters before. Yossarian put another can of soup up to cook and ate that too when it was hot. Every time a car door slammed, he broke into a hopeful smile and turned expectantly toward the entrance, listening for footsteps. He knew that any moment Orr would come walking into the tent with big, glistening, rain-soaked eyes, cheeks and buck teeth, looking ludicrously like a jolly New England oysterman in a yellow oilskin rain hat and slicker numerous sizes too large for him and holding up proudly for Yossarian’s amusement a great dead codfish he had caught. But he didn’t.

This passage from Catch-22 nearly defies criticism. I’ll only say a couple things. My favorite word in the passage has to be numerous in “numerous sizes too large”. “Several sizes too large” is the type of shrink-wrapped phrase that George Orwell so bemoaned (see previous discussion), and substituting numerous for several gives the phrase a more rarefied, slightly absurd air.

My second comment applies to sentence length. The meandering, gushing penultimate sentence has an emotional energy that I think would be dissipated were it chopped up into smaller pieces. It takes energy to construct a long sentence; this energy either derives from excitement or duty, and as a result a long sentence is either very lively or very dull. In fiction it is usually lively. In this case the sentence is lively, touching, and humorous; the image is quite like a child presenting you with a frog. It hardly prepares the reader for the next three words, whose ominous power is derived from their brevity: “But he didn’t.” Far more powerful, I think, than the fatal three-word sentence in Kurt Vonnegut’s war novel (“So it goes”), but not quite as moving as the single word that the ancient Romans, so many generations ago, would engrave on the tombstones of their deceased: Vixit. He lived.