Quote 2

"One of the things [Yossarian] wanted to start screaming about was the surgeon’s knife that was almost certain to be waiting for him and everyone else who lived long enough to die. He wondered often how he would ever recognize the first chill, flush, twinge, ache, belch, sneeze, stain, lethargy, vocal slip, loss of balance or lapse of memory that would signal the inevitable beginning of the inevitable end."

Yossarian, although confronted with the horrors of war on a daily basis, has not become any more immune to common fears. Interestingly, they seem to have made him more aware of the delicacy and brittleness of life itself. Catch-22 is in one way an inescapable trap that keeps him in the army, but Yossarian realizes that even if manages to escape, he is still in the inescapable trap of death.