Every family has a story, and so do mine. It is of my great grandfather escaping The Kashmir War in 1947. My mother said he remembered the experience as being chaotic and tiring, where for the first time he genuinely was afraid, afraid to lose his life. He was afraid of what our world had become, relying upon the pointless wars to find solutions. He had questioned, my mother recalled, “Is it worth it?” Through their representation of corrupt bureaucracy and the senseless reality and brutality of war, both author of the satirical novel Catch-22, Joseph Heller, and poet Bruce Dawe in Homecoming elucidate war as being futile and dehumanising.
Heller fulfils his purpose in to represent the self-centred, self-interested and corrupt nature of