The Whore and How she becomes a parallel character to the novel as a whole

Essay by nicolenaHigh School, 12th gradeA+, February 2004

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A Psycho Whore

A man is faced with the horrible task of delivering the news of his friend's fatality to his love partner...a whore. She then tries to stab the man to death with a -wait a minute- a potato peeler! She continues to insults him by calling him "bruto!" and by spitting on his face. The woman then seduces this man into trusting her and later she pulls out a bread knife to kill him. The whore's little sister gets involved and copies off her older sibling attacking this poor man with another bread knife. The woman then stalks him all the way to the men's restroom where she is prepared to kill, but this time with a steak knife. The scene goes so far that this whore follows him all the way from Rome to Pianosa, where he had come from in the first place. This time, the soldier takes her into a plane and drops her off behind enemy lines.

All this occurred to kill the messenger by mistaking him as the criminal.

This bizarre and violent scene is depicted by Heller to make Yossarian's death threat tangible to the reader. Up to this point the audience knows that Yossarian feels as if he was being a bit paranoid and fearing that he may not live as long as he wants. Yet the reader cannot grasp the magnitude of his situation. After all he is found in a war and people are meant to die in them. However, with this scene the spectators become sympathetic with the main character. In fact when the whore goes so far as to even offer herself sexually just to kill this man, Yossarian's death threat becomes real and it may just happen at that moment. That which engages the...