One Hundred and Thirty, Gore Galore!

I'd like to take a second to warn you the following excerpt is very graphic.

"They didn't take it on the lam weirdly inside a cloud the way Clevinger had done. They didn't explode into blood and clotted matter. They didn't drown or get struck by lightning, mangled by machinery or crushed in landslides. They didn't get shot to death in hold-ups, strangled to death in rapes, stabbed to death in saloons, bludgeoned to death with axes by parents or children, or die summarily by some other act of God. Nobody choked to death. People bled to death like gentlemen in an operating room or expired without comment in an oxygen tent. There was none of that tricky now-you-see-me-now-you-don't business so much in vogue outside the hospital, none of that now-I-am-and-now-I-ain't. There were no famines or floods. Children didn't suffocate in cradles or iceboxes or fall under trucks. No one was beaten to death. People didn't stick their heads into ovens with the gas on, jump in front of subway trains or come plummeting like dead weights out of hotel windows with a whoosh!, accelerating at the rate of thirty-two feet per second to land with a hideous plop! on the sidewalk and die disgustingly there in public like an alpaca sack full of hairy strawberry ice cream, bleeding, pink toes awry."

I think it's odd that I've read Catch-22 twice and both times the same paragraph stopped me cold with the descriptions held therein. It's not a simple matter of saying that people outside of the hospitals in the war die quite unpleasantly. Different deaths, both inside and outside hospitals, are described in detail to show how the outside world is crazier than the inside world. And I love it. The last sentence really does draw me in for some odd reason (maybe the ice cream and italicized words) and makes me stop after reading it and think to myself, "Wow, how cool!" Note that this is strictly talking about how immersing the paragraph is, not necessarily the different methods of death described within the paragraph.

I'm hungry.