cies are themselves a kind of Catch-22, for instead of rehabilitating
the hero, they further strip him or her of all identity and individual-
ity, ironically at one time the very measures of sanity and health.
But the contemporary protagonist often learns to turn the asylum, or
its counterpart, into a kind of "temple of consciousness"³ and to
make a rebellion against its unnatural and totalitarian order a
metaphor for the larger rebellion against oppressive social institu-
tions (for example, religion, government, big business, the military),
the protagonist's original and ultimate adversaries.

The current study focuses on five significant, representative
experimental novels -- Catch-22 ( 1961), One Flew Over the Cuck-
oo's Nest ( 1962), Slaughterhouse-Five ( 1969), Being There ( 1970),
and Sophie's Choice ( 1979) -- that explore precisely the illogic (and,
at times, the outright insanity) of contemporary existence. Each
portrays a protagonist who is mad or is considered by others to be
mad -- a protagonist who, however, possesses or reveals a special
insight into the dangers of the institution's demand for social,
political, and cultural conformity. That insight usually compels him
or her to respond to the collective threat that the institution poses.
Sometimes the protagonists are successful: Yossarian escapes Pi-
anosa as he heads for Italy and, ultimately, an even more neutral
zone; Bromden breaks out of the hospital and returns to the natural
world; and Billy Pilgrim survives, even triumphs over, daily life by
time-traveling to the better world of Tralfamadore. Sometimes the
protagonists are less successful and pay for their resistance with
their lives: Sophie and Nathan, unable to live with the truth, choose
to die in a mutual suicide pact; McMurphy is lobotomized and then
mercifully smothered (though not before he passes his strength on to
the other men on the psychiatric hospital ward). And sometimes
their success or failure is ironic and ambiguous: Chance, for in-
stance, may escape the blur of celebrity to return to the tranquility
of the garden, or he may stay caught in the social whorl he neither
understands nor enjoys. (In either case, Chance's simplemindedness
makes him blissfully unaware of how troubled his society must be
if he can be perceived as its "only chance.") And, while Stingo loses
Sophie, he achieves fame with his novel, which resurrects and
redeems him as much as it does her.

Though each of the novels offers a somewhat different perspective
on the plight of the individual against the forces of the organized
institution that, as Raymond Olderman observes, "in the name of

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