Language And Techniques in Joseph Heller’s Select Novels

ABSTRACT
An analysis of Heller's language is presented in this paper, which discusses Closing Time, Something Happened and Good as Gold. His fiction is characterized by self-negating sentences, circular structure, and repetitive storylines. Heller’s writing style is a combination of satire in which he uses humor, irony and exaggeration to criticize the society, bureaucracy and politics. His novels has illogical, contradictory and absurd situation. In this way he imitates Kafka, Albert Camus and Samuel Beckett. Heller has used humor over the years as a protective shield. The serious issues like death war and morality is discussed under black humor. He uses paradoxical themes in which the characters suffer from contradictions between individual desire and societal expectations. The next style he uses in his writing is wordplay which means using words which has double meanings. He uses human condition and societal norms of his time in his novels which also reflects the issues dealt in postcolonial studies.