MovieChat Forums > Catch-22 (1970) Discussion > His name is 'Aram Yossarian' on his dog ...

His name is 'Aram Yossarian' on his dog tags in the movie poster

posted 13 years ago by jonchopwood
2 replies | jump to latest

Yossarian's first name is "Aram" on his dog tags in the movie poster. "My name is Aram" of course, is a famous short story by the Armenian-American author William Saroyan. Yossarian is an Aremenian name (or Armenian-like), though he says he is Assyrian in the book and movie. (Heller once said, I believe, that he didn't really know what an Assyrian was at the time he wrote the book. In the sequel, "Closing Time", Yossarian is an Armenian American who has joked that he was an Assyrian. It's important as Armenians, of course, were the victims of one of the greatest genocide aside from the Holocaust and had their own diaspora, like the Jews.

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"Why do people always laugh in the wrong places?"
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[–] rac701 11 years ago

The dogtags on the movie poster may have "Aram" as Yossarian's first name, but there is a reference (possibly only a single one) to it in the novel, and it is "John."

[–] darryl-tahirali 10 years ago

The dogtags on the movie poster may have "Aram" as Yossarian's first name, but there is a reference (possibly only a single one) to it in the novel, and it is "John." - rac701

Yes, I concur: There is only one reference to Yossarian's first name, and it is a rather oblique one.

I've read an interview of Joseph Heller done way back for The Realist magazine in which Heller tells the interviewer, magazine founder Paul Krassner, that he wanted to make a reference to Yossarian's first name somewhere so Yossarian would not wind up as too obvious a symbol.

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"We hear very little, and we understand even less." - Refugee in Casablanca