Orr (Catch-22)

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Orr is a character in Joseph Heller's magnum opus, Catch-22.

Captain Orr is the only other member of the squadron who is considered crazier than Yossarian. He is presumed a simpleton by the other characters but is eventually revealed to have had the clearest view of the absurdities of their situation. Although he has been shot down more times than anyone else in the unit, he continues to fly (he is seen as too insane to request to be grounded) and continually encourages Yossarian to fly with him, intimating that it would be to his advantage.

He is also very mechanically adept, as he manages to make for himself and Yossarian (his bunk mate) a veritable palace of a (slightly oversized) tent.

Orr has a bucktoothed smile and frequently puts crabapples in his cheeks and chestnuts in his hands. He never gives any explanation for this other than he wants big cheeks so as to detract from the peculiarity of having chesnuts in his hand and vice-versa, this oddity is analogous to the absurd ambuiguity of the entire story. He uses this behavior to draw Yossarian into circular arguments that never seem to be resolved and serve to only frustrate Yossarian.

An incident with an unnamed prostitute in a Roman hotel is one of the most puzzling and elusive things about Orr (at least in Yossarian's view), and it is never entirely explained to the reader before Orr disappears: apparently, she was hired to jump up and down in the nude, and hit a giggling, equally naked Orr on the head with her heeled shoes. Each time she jumped and hit him, Orr giggled louder, making her even more (seemingly) angry; she would then jump higher and hit him harder, causing him to giggle even more. The vicious cycle ended when she put him out cold, leaving him with a concussion. In the concluding pages of the novel, Yossarian realizes that Orr hired her to hit him so he could receive leave.

As it turns out, Orr (like Yossarian) has a firm grasp of his situation. We finally discover that he has been using his frequent crashes to practice ocean survival techniques, and then used his final crash to fake his own death and row all the way to Sweden, where he will sit out the rest of the war. The news of this escape eventually reaches Yossarian in Italy, causing him to undergo a revelation as to Orr's motives about his actions and re-energizes him to keep on "fighting the system".

Significance of his name

Orr may be a play on words for 'oar', as at times Orr seems to be "up a creek without a paddle". It may also be a play on the word 'or', as in stay or leave, escape or die. Throughout most of the book, Orr is the only character who understands that this is even a choice; he spends most of his time either practicing for the chance to exercise his options (crashing repeatedly in the Mediterranean) or paddling to freedom after he crashes successfully. In the end, it appears that Orr's behavior with the crabapples and other incidents were clues to indicate that Orr was the only character in the book who understood how to defeat the law of Catch-22.