Snowden of Yesteryear

"Yossarian lost his nerve on the mission to Avignon because Snowden lost his guts" (Heller,234).

This is the first reference to Snowden's death that starts to explain what happened. There were references earlier asking what happened to him, and talking about how the plane went crazy. Now we see that Snowden died on the plane when his guts were spilled out. Yossarian lost it from this and its a critical point in his realization of Catch-22 to be a debasement of language. He starts to despise war from this point and constantly wants to disobey authority that is in place simply because people will listen to their oddly constructed words and think they are following orders for a good reason, when it may be complete nonsense. This is what symbolizes life and death and what is really at stake for Yossarian and when he begins to perpetually try to avoid death thinking everyone is trying to kill him, because they are and he is sane enough to realize there's a war and that the authority is debasing language to trap them all in the army.