I think crowbait is on to it.
Mallett has expressed a certain fondness for Catch 22 in at least one previous comic...
However, in the tree-climbing, graveyard part of Catch 22, I think I remember Yossarian being naked, which wouldn't be much of a costume.
At first I thought of Poe, then I ran across this quote from Tolstoy's "War And Peace":
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"One step beyond that boundary line which resembles the line dividing the living from the dead lies uncertainty, suffering, and death. And what is there? Who is there?--there beyond that field, that tree, that roof lit up by the sun? No one knows, but one wants to know. You fear and yet long to cross that line, and know that sooner or later it must be crossed and you will have to find out what is there, just as you will inevitably have to learn what lies the other side of death. But you are strong, healthy, cheerful, and excited, and are surrounded by other such excitedly animated and healthy men." So thinks, or at any rate feels, anyone who comes in sight of the enemy, and that feeling gives a particular glamour and glad keenness of impression to everything that takes place at such moments.
--Book II, chapter 8
Radiohead wouldn't fit as a "literary character". Caulfield reads far beyond material written for his age, so it's hard telling what Jef's got up his sleeve for him this year. He never makes this easy on us.
I remember Archibald MacLeish for "JB" (about Job):
"Alone, upon his dry dung heap,
That man cries out who cannot sleep,
'If God is God, he is not good;
If God is good, he is not God.'
Take the even, take the odd,
I would not sleep here if I could,
Except for the little green leaves in the wood
And the wind on the water."
But I don't get the "there, there" reference.
