Death is often personified or compared to other animate objects in order to express its ambiguous nature in how and when it could strike. Heller incorporates a significant use of comparison through simile throughout his work, connecting common items the readers can associate with to situations of death and its haunting presence at every corner, in order to convey his theme. When Yossarian was walking on a path through his squadron, “he saw dozens of new mushrooms the rain had spawned poking their nodular fingers up through the clammy earth like lifeless stalks of flesh” (Heller 143). Yossarian’s paranoia spikes so inauspiciously when concerning death that he begins to discern it everywhere he looks, mushrooms suddenly morphing into dismembered …show more content…
During one mission, death seemed to be dropping people like flies from the sky. Everywhere the soldiers looked, another man was dying, crashing their plane into debris or the ground as they were shot down. One specific group of planes “gyrated into a spin and fell the rest of the way to the ground, fluttering insensibly inside its vivid pyre like a shred of colored tissue paper” as they were “blasted apart” (Heller 150). Heller depicts an explosion of planes, consequently the deaths of many, through a comparison to colored tissue paper in his work, expressing the almost natural and continual termination of life that occurs through war. War is an attempt at negotiation gone violent, a noun that has bloodied the history of the world with millions of deaths and counting, a painful statistic that seems almost normal to the people who study, read, or even interpret it. This war that is rendered by Heller is no different, and these comparisons make it very evident to both the reader and the characters within the story that death is unable to be avoided in any circumstance, whether it be a trick of the mind that brings it to light or actual events of death that make it