The theme of friendship, tempered with romance, dominates these chapters. With Heller, we can expect neither to be presented in conventional ways.
Yossarian is often an admirable character, but he is certainly no "hero" and would not want to be one. However, his attitude toward women is especially bothersome. He is a womanizer with an oddly romantic bent, falling in love with almost everyone he beds but treating women primarily as sexual objects. When he arrives in Rome, for example, he misses "Nurse Duckett so much that he [goes] searching hungrily through the streets for Luciana, whose laugh and invisible scar" he has never forgotten. Not finding her, he hopes to run across the "boozy, blowzy, bleary-eyed floozy" whom he saw at the officers' club on a previous visit (Chapter 16). He is "deeply in love" with all three women. Having searched for the latter two in vain, he has meaningless sex with a streetwalker and, the next day, a similar coupling with a short, chubby girl whom he finds in the enlisted men's apartment. He then goes shopping for a present for Nurse Duckett. In that context, Nately's passion for "his" prostitute seems mature and sincere.
Nately's whore is in trouble; he needs his friends to help him rescue her. After engaging in an orgy with two other hookers and some middle-aged, boorish senior officers, she has been abandoned to the sadistic whims of the older men. The senior officers are drunk and weary, but they want Nately's whore to give them one last, odd satisfaction. She is too tired to fight but doesn't understand what they want:
"Say uncle," they said to her.
"Uncle," she said.
"No, no. Say uncle."
"Uncle," she said.
"She still doesn't understand."
"You still don't understand, do you? We can't really make you say uncle unless you don't want to say uncle. Don't you see? Don't say uncle when I tell you to say uncle. Okay? Say uncle.
"Uncle," she said.
"No, don't say uncle. Say uncle."
She didn't say uncle.
"That's good!"
"That's very good."
"It's a start. Now say uncle."
"Uncle," she said.
"It's no good."
