What Are You Talking About?

Lieutenant Scheisskopf, Major Metcalf, and Clevinger all share an interesting dialogue towards the end of chapter 8, and it's crazy enough to leave you wondering, "Just what the heck did I read?" Dr. Preston asked us to compare their nonsense dialogue with the dialogue between Abbott & Costello in their comedy routine "Who's On First." Abbott & Costello constantly contradict each other and don't really know what they're saying to each other. In the chapter, Major Metcalf, Lieutenant Scheisskopf, and the colonel are spewing absolute nonsense that could be seen as them just contradicting each other without even knowing, sometimes they even contradict themselves. I find these types of dialogues to be quite interesting and definitely entertaining. It's funny to see how clueless both scenarios can really be and especially how confusing the characters play out to be because the rest of the people can't seem to agree with each other. I find that Major Metcalf and the colonel are the ones that tend to fight a lot, but that's only because Major Metcalf seems to always say something that is never entirely true, and then the colonel shuts him down but then attacks Clevinger with even bigger nonsense. I think Heller created this ridiculous dialogue because everyone can get a good laugh from it and maybe see that not everything that goes on between them is always intelligent and common sense.