Going After Cacciato by Tim O'Brien

Going After Cacciato

It is generally recognized that Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato (1978) is most likely the best novel of the Vietnam war, albeit an unusual one in that it innovatively combines the experiential realism of war with surrealism, primarily through the overactive imagination of the protagonist, Spec Four Paul Berlin. The first chapter of this novel is of more than usual importance. Designed to be a self-sufficient story (McCaffery 137) and often anthologized as one, this chapter is crucial to the novel in that it not only introduces us to the characters and the situation but also sets the tenor of the novel and reveals its author’s view of this war in relation to which all else in the novel must be judged.

In chapter 1, the plot of the entire novel is defined: A very young soldier named Cacciato deserts, intending to walk to Paris by land. As his squad follows under orders to capture him, Paul Berlin begins his fascinating mind-journey of “going after Cacciato,” of escape from, and later a reexamination of, the reality of war. But what is defined first, in the first two pages to be exact, is this war’s reality and its cost to the young American soldiers involved. These pages list for us those who have died, in action and otherwise, and those who have been maimed, at times through self-injury, underscoring the urgency of the desire to live. These pages also vividly delineate for us the daily miseries and sufferings of the Vietnam war, from rain and mud to disease

and rotting flesh, from monotony and fear to a profound sense of futility. As Paul Berlin narrates, “It was a bad time” (O’Brien 1). And the young soldiers undergo all of this while being “led” by an ill, alcoholic, mis...

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...t a mistake was made in Vietnam?... we misunderstood Vietnamese history...and we were shooting anyway” (Lomperis 73). Both the novel and the author condemn this war. And it is in this novel’s first, crucial

chapter that such views are most clearly embodied, molding all the rest.

Bibliography:

Bates, Milton J. “Tim O’Brien’s Myth of Courage.” Modern Fiction Studies 33.2 (summer 1987): 263-79

Lomperis, Timothy J. “Reading the Wind”: The Literature of the Vietnam War. Durham: Duke UP, 1987.

McCaffery, Larry. “Interview with Tim O’Brien.” Chicago Review 33.2 (1982):129-49.

Schroeder, Eric James. “Two Interviews: Talks with Tim O’Brien and Robert Stone.”

Modern Fiction Studies 30.1 (spring 1984): 135-64.

Vannatta, Dennis. “Theme and Structure in Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato.” Modern

Fiction Studies 28.2 (summer 1982): 242-6.