For my major project at University of Hertfordshire I redesigned Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22 from 1961. Heller criticise the bureaucratic system through a bizarre fictive tale about the lives of U.S. Army Air Forces soldiers under World War 2 based on Pianosa, an island west for Italy. It focuses on their attempts to keep their sanity in order to fulfill their service requirements so that they may return home. 

 

For my solution I chose to focus on the bureaucratic complications Heller intensifies throughout the novel. As these complications often are carried out through the characters, the book is designed to force the reader through a file system based on these characters contained in an old metal filing cabinet. 

Every chapter is assigned to a character record that again has been assigned a number. In the top drawer the book is located in an alphabetical order of the chapter names together with a box containing information about the book and the author and the prefix. In this box there is also a chapter overview that explains the reading order of the novel by listing the numbers of character records. Hence the reader has to look at the chapter overview to find the right number, then proceed into the character records to find the right chapter name and finally back to the top drawer to locate the chapter. While the system is fairly easy to learn, using it will most likely make the reader moan in frustration. 

 

Not only does the system force the reader to experience the bureaucratic system Heller is criticizing, but also provides the reader with the ability to learn more about the characters in the book. This may improve the reader’s understanding and further enhance the experience.