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This essay has actually been a long time coming so thank you for prompting it!

The C22 guys are not a diverse cast; the book goes only by historical accuracy and limited personal experience so doesn’t handle race well, and all of these people are white, white, white unless explicitly stated otherwise. There is no way Heller intentionally wrote Dunbar as a black man, but it is, in my opinion, the only way to read him. It enhances the entire book if you do.

I started reading Dunbar as black passing-for-white because it makes the bit where they’re teasing the Texan about the threat of a desegregated hospital a hundred times better. Putting someone who very obviously has at least one black parent in a white ingroup because their skin was deemed ‘light enough’ fits the kind of narrative Heller is trying to push- something that’s true but feels unreal; absurd without being funny. Dunbar’s the only character in a book of 50+ characters without any kind of physical description, and one of the only characters with a normal and quintessentially American surname. He’s Yossarian’s best friend who goes to another school squadron and, like Yossarian, he’s obsessed with his own mortality. They commiserate in a way no one else does, so it would make sense that they’re the only people of color in their cohort thrust together by circumstance. 

All of that was enough for thinking of him as an average-looking guy from a black family, but as the book goes on it really solidifies.

Dunbar’s whole deal with identity is hard to capture in just one passage, but it is the reason I specifically read him as ‘passing’ w/ light brown skin (Senegalese and Western European background, his great-grandparents the first generation of Dunbars not born into slavery.) Colorism has led to countless struggles with African American identity and I see him exploring that in a lot of ways.

This is already classism, but to make it a true catch-22 I like the idea that he’s the opposite of the fighter captain in every way that counts. Also a great example of the way he carries himself- funny, philosophical, but overly composed and prone to tamping down his emotions.

In the back half of the book he’s constantly getting in trouble even though his temper and bad behavior are no worse than anyone else’s. His anger is ‘off-putting’ and ‘unjustified’ even as Dobbs’ anger is excusable and Yossarian’s endearing. Dobbs is doing the exact same thing as Dunbar when they’re accosted for throwing the wardrobe out, but Dunbar’s the one punished because he back-talks. Like Clevinger he’s framed as too smart for his own good, but rather than being a know-it-all it’s genuine moral outrage.

Speaking out is also what gets him killed in the end, and while the method of his death could conceivably have been used on anyone during WWII, there is a long, long, long history of the US government disappearing its black citizens.