Other characters introduced in these chapters are of varying importance. The Texan is a very pleasant, very ignorant bigot who maintains that "people of means — decent folk — should be given more votes than drifters, whores, criminals, degenerates, atheists, and indecent folk." Yossarian can't stand him. After ten days, the Texan's disgusting charm has cleared the ward, sending Yossarian back to his tent in the squadron. Chaplain Tappman is briefly introduced as one of Yossarian's favorites; we'll hear much more from him as the novel develops. Dunbar is one of Yossarian's best friends. Dunbar has a theory that he can extend his life by exposing himself to as much boredom as possible, thus making time seem to pass more slowly.
Perhaps representing the anonymity of the individual in the institutional military, the "soldier in white" is especially important to the grave tone in the background of the opening chapters. The enigmatic soldier in white was smuggled into the ward in the middle of the night and is "encased from head to toe in plaster and gauze." The soldier's four limbs are pinioned in air by lead weights. No one knows for sure if the soldier is black or white, male or female, or even if there is a body inside the casing. The closest anyone ever comes to seeing the actual soldier is a frayed black hole over its mouth. The soldier in white is fed intravenously from a jar hanging above its casing; the soldier's urine drips through a tube into another jar, on the floor. When the feeding jar is empty, it is simply switched with the collecting jar so that the soldier apparently is "fed" its own urine. After Nurse Cramer's thermometer registers no temperature from the soldier in white, she declares the soldier dead. Yossarian and Dunbar accuse the bigoted Texan of murdering the soldier because the soldier is black; the Texan denies it, pointing out a historical fact: the Army was still segregated in 1944, and black soldiers would be in a different ward. Within the convoluted logic of the novel, in which cause and effect get confused, it is actually Nurse Cramer who has "murdered" the soldier; if she had not taken its temperature, the soldier would not have been declared dead.
