Soldier in white
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The Soldier in White is a fictional character in the novel Catch-22.
Located in the hospital, he is totally wrapped in bandages, and two bottles are connected to him. One bottle feeds into his arm, the other drains from a zinc catheter. The arrangement is made unusual because both bottles contain an identical and unidentified clear liquid. Yossarian is convinced that when the first bottle is empty and the second bottle is full, they are switched to repeat the process again. One of the officers in the ward, baffled by the procedure, asks why the doctors could not just "hook the two jars up to each other and eliminate the middleman?". The soldier's temperature is taken daily, and ultimately, his death is noted by that information alone.
The man in white receives no medical care. All the nurses do, besides taking his temperature and switching the bottles, is to scrub his cast and polish the zinc catheter with metal polish. The latter is a singularly useless procedure, as unalloyed zinc is never shiny; its most common use is to prevent the corrosion of other metals by becoming corroded first, as in galvanized iron and steel and in sacrificial anodes to protect metal parts of a ship from corrosion by electrolysis.
This obvious case of poor medical practice is barely acknowledged, highlighting the absurdity of military bureaucracy.
The character of the soldier in white is an enigmatic one, symbolic of many people throughout the novel. Yossarian and Dunbar consider that he has been murdered, at first by Nurse Cramer or by The Texan. The novel's characters also develop the supposition that he is a negro, and is wrapped in bandages to hide his presence in a segregated hospital. The supposition is also raised that there is actually nobody at all within the cast bandages, a literally hollow man to counterpoint the emptiness of the other characters.
Some time after the soldier in white 'dies', another man (shorter and fatter) enters the hospital in the same way- when none of the main characters were around to see him being brought in- completely shrouded in bandages (reportedly due to burns). Dunbar, having been in the hospital for the entry of both the first and second soldiers in white, believed that the soldier from before had returned upon the entry of the second. This raises chaos in the hospital, and Dunbar peers inside the mouth to see if it really is a hollow man. Soon afterwards, Dunbar is 'disappeared' by government officials and never seen again.
