[3][4] He has an uncanny resemblance to real-life actor Henry Fonda, which scholar Philip D. Beidler calls "one of the novel's great absurd jokes".
[4] Heller echoes the eponymous character in Edwin Arlington Robinson's 1910 poem "Miniver Cheevy" in his initial description of Maj. Major as "born too late and too mediocre".
[5][2] The character is further described as having "three strikes against him from the beginning – his mother, his father, and Henry Fonda, to whom he bore a sickly resemblance almost from the moment of his birth.
Total strangers saw fit to deprecate him, with the result that he was stricken early with a guilty fear of people and an obsequious impulse to apologize to society for the fact that he was not Henry Fonda.
"[6][2] Working from the basis of a resemblance to Henry Fonda, and from the thesis that people in the novel were, contrary to Heller's claims, heavily inspired by people and events from his own wartime experiences, Daniel Setzer deduces that the real-world inspiration for the character of Maj. Major was Randall C. Casada, who was Heller's squadron commander when he was stationed on Corsica.
[2] Relating Catch-22 characters to William J. Goode's sociological definition of ineptitude, Jerry M. Lewis and Stanford W. Gregory describe Maj. Major as the "clearest portrayal of an inept role" in the novel.