Orr

"Do you remember... that time in Rome when that girl who can’t stand you kept hitting me over the head with the heel of her shoe? Do you want to know why she was hitting me?"

- Orr to Yossarian

Orr (full name revealed to be Ivor Orr in the miniseries ) is a major character in Joseph Heller's satirical novel Catch-22. He is Yossarian’s often-maddening roommate. Orr is a gifted fix-it man who is always constructing little improvements to the tent that he shares with Yossarian. He almost always crashes his plane or is shot down on combat missions, but he always manages to survive.

Improving the tent
Orr shares a tent with Yossarian, and is very mechanically adept, as he manages to make for them the most luxurious tent in the squadron. When working on small pieces for an oven stove in the tent, Yossarian sees his work as arduous and highly unnecessary as the pieces are too small for anything of real concern, yet at the end while using his stove, he realizes the intricate simplicity of improving the stove's performance. Although this tinkering drives Yossarian mad, any idea of harming Orr is so absurd that Yossarian can't follow through with it.

Crab apples
Orr has a bucktoothed smile and frequently puts crabapples or horse chestnuts in his cheeks and rubber balls in his hands. He constantly teases Yossarian asking him if he wants to know why, to which Yossarian invariably says "yes". Orr never gives any straightforward explanation for this other than he wants big cheeks and to detract from the peculiarity of this he keeps rubber balls in his hands. As he explains the latter, "Every time someone asked me why I was walking around with crab apples in my cheeks, I'd just open my hands and show them it was rubber balls I was walking around with, not crab apples, and that they were in my hands, not my cheeks. It was a good story. But I never knew if it got across or not, since it's pretty tough to make people understand you when you're talking to them with two crab apples in your cheeks."

This oddity is analogous to other absurd and ambiguous conversations in the novel, which are circular and end up having little or no significance. He uses this behaviour to draw Yossarian into circular arguments that never seem to be resolved and serve to only frustrate Yossarian (which amuses Orr who generally chortles at his cleverness).

Incident with a prostitute
An incident with an unnamed prostitute in a hotel in Rome is one of the most puzzling and elusive events in the novel, and it is never entirely explained to the reader.

The whole apartment watches as the prostitute jumps up and down naked, and hits a giggling, equally naked Orr on the head with her heeled shoes. Each time she jumps and hit him, Orr giggles louder, making her even more angry. She then would jump even higher and hit him harder, causing him to giggle even more. The vicious cycle ends after fifteen to twenty minutes when she knocks him out cold with a good whack to his head, leaving him with a concussion "that kept him out of combat for only twelve days."

Yossarian, on learning that Orr has escaped to Sweden, in the concluding pages of the novel, decides that she was hired by Orr as part of a plan to receive leave. Yossarian realises that the prostitute was jumping on Orr's head "because he was paying her to, that's why! But she wouldn't hit him hard enough, so he had to row to Sweden." The incident was simply another of Orr's plans to escape from the war.

Plane crashes
Orr (like Yossarian) has a firm grasp of his situation in the war effort. As the story unfolds between harrowing war scenes and more personable ones such as Orr and Yossarian meeting prostitutes in Rome, Orr more and more enunciates his guile and clever techniques to move toward his freedom from war. At first, his frequent airplane crashes seems to hint toward a clumsy, foolish pilot who has little knack and knowledge for his craft. In the concluding chapters, Orr purposefully crashes for two reasons: to throw off all of the commanding officers who would believe he met his demise and to learn where and how to crash in order to be close to Sweden. The generals, colonels, and other commanding officers in the higher echelons constantly and consistently appear to be vain and care only about their own careers. To expect that Orr could survive a crash would certainly fall out of their range of focus and would not create much of an uproar, especially because of Orr's unfailing "ability" to crash. It is also paradoxical, in the classic way of the novel, that Orr has to crash his plane repeatedly - practising for the time that he will crash his plane.

Throughout the last ten chapters Yossarian along with Orr thinks diligently about crashing near a neutral country such as Switzerland or Sweden to be interned there for the rest of the war. Since heading directly toward one of the two countries would give the appearance of fleeing similar to AWOL, a more surreptitious and clandestine indirect path would work better. By practicing to crash, Orr learned how to do so in a fashion where he could escape as narrowly as possible to hint at death; those in higher power would simply wave it off and move on with their bureaucratic motives, leaving Orr to his especially spacious freedom. He used the crashes as practice for ocean survival techniques, as is evident in his self-titled chapter in which he and his crew members are in a life raft. He learns not only the physical but mental aspects as well, keeping himself jocular and humorous while on the seas to keep from getting bored or going mad. 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". It is only then that he realises that Orr's requests that Yossarian should fly with him was actually a scheme for them both to escape to Sweden.

Personality
Described as "a warm-hearted, simple-minded gnome," Orr is the only person in the group considered to be crazier than his good friend Yossarian, with whom he shares a tent. Orr appears to take great joy in thoroughly confounding those around him by being completely nonsensical, however this is later revealed to most likely be a part of his escape plan. He is declared MIA halfway through the novel after crashing his plane in the Mediterranean, but by the end it's revealed that he had rowed to the neutral zone in Sweden to escape the army. At this point, Yossarian realizes that Orr's constant crashes had been part of his plan and his survival inspires Yossarian to finally flee the army.

Trivia

 * In Mike Nichols' 1970 film adaptation of the novel, Orr was played by Bob Balaban. He played in the 2019 Hulu's mini-series by Graham Patrick Martin.
 * Apart from a brief explanation that Orr is "from the wilderness outside New York City", there is no real detail of Orr's past. We also do not learn his first name in the novel; in the mini-series, however, Milo Minderbinder introduces him as "Ivor Orr" (which sounds like "either or").