What Heller finally offers us super-sensitive Westerners is a contemporary world in which we may ignore what threatens us, ... a world in which the s… - Carl Oglesby

In the end, very like Camus, [Joseph] Heller has tried to buy time for himself and his culture, snarled with lunacy and injustice as it is, by wrapping up everything in a tissue of cynicism and privileged impotence. History being insufferable but unchangeable, he says the good man is therefore morally reprieved from the awful sentence of having to change it. In the company of Camus' solitary rebel, he need only desert.

The conscience exists, standing before us now asking not to be created or perfected but to be chosen and defended, in need of champions, not exiles. Any fiction which refuses that request is henceforth a collaborationist fiction.

In a strong sense, the Old Right and the New Left are morally and politically coordinate.