Closing Time (novel)
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| Closing Time | |
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| Author | Joseph Heller |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Satire Historical novel |
| Publisher | Simon & Schuster |
| Publication date | 1994 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback) |
| Pages | 464 pp (1st edition hardback) |
| Preceded by | Catch-22 |
Closing Time is a 1994 novel by Joseph Heller as a sequel to the popular Catch-22. It takes place in New York City in the 1990s, and revisits some characters of the original, including Yossarian, Milo Minderbinder and Chaplain Tappman.
At the end of Closing Time, both Yossarian and the chaplain apparently decide to commit passive suicide. Both were deep within the bowels of the earth, safe from an impending nuclear holocaust the President of the United States launched, believing he was playing a video game. Both decided to go back to the surface. Yossarian decides to keep his lunch date with his girlfriend; the chaplain boards a bus to go home to Kenosha, Wisconsin.
The book is an oddity, in that two stories are interwoven throughout – that of Yossarian in the last stages of his life, and that of Sammy Singer and Lew Rabinowitz, two men from Coney Island who also fought in World War II (the Sammy Singer character makes a brief appearance in Catch-22 as as the tailgunner aboard Yossarian's bomber who kept waking up and fainting when he saw Yossarian trying to attend to the wounds of Snowden).
The story written around Sammy Singer and Lew Rabinowitz is completely different in mood and style, and seems to be an attempt either at writing a novel within a novel, or of trying to combine two unfinished works. Heller's tone is more nostalgic and he writes in first-person. The only connections between the two stories are Catch-22, references made by Singer to Yossarian and the war, and a chance meeting of the two.
One notable inconsistency in the book is that although Yossarian was 28 in Catch-22, which took place in 1944, in Closing Time, Yossarian is 68, and the time of Catch-22 is referred to as "50 years ago".
There is a man mentioned by Sammy Singer's friend Lew named Vonnegut whom he met while in Dresden. This is a reference to Kurt Vonnegut's experiences in the Bombing of Dresden and his book Slaughterhouse-Five.
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