Tilting at Mortality: Narrative Strategies in Joseph Heller's Fiction

Unlike her studies of Joseph Heller, which focus on his two primary works, Catch-22 and Something Happened, this volume consider Heller's entire career and examines each of his novels on its own terms, including Heller's latest work, Closing Time. Tilting at Mortality pursues two complementary tracks: first, David M. Craig explores the evolution of Heller's essential subject, human mortality; and second, he delineates Heller's artistic development as a novelist. In Craig's study, each novel emerges as another gesture of comic defiance, constituting a strident, insistent, angry, sometimes eloquent protest against mortality.