Going After Cacciato: War, Fantasy, and the Vietnam Experience
This paper analyzes Tim O'Brien's National Book Award–winning novel Going After Cacciato, examining how O'Brien uses dream, fantasy, and blurred reality to portray the psychological impact of the Vietnam War on American soldiers. The essay discusses protagonist Paul Berlin's imaginary pursuit of a deserter named Cacciato across Asia and Europe toward Paris, showing how soldiers retreat into fantasy to survive the horrors of war. The paper also considers O'Brien's critique of military leadership, the soldiers' alienation from the Vietnamese people and culture, and the novel's anti-war argument — that war leaves its participants permanently and irreparably changed.
- Introduction: A Novel of War and Imagination: Overview of O'Brien's themes and novel premise
- Dreams and Fantasy as Psychological Survival: Fantasy and home memories as coping mechanisms
- Military Leadership and the Ambiguity of Mission: Critique of leadership and unclear war objectives
- Soldiers and the Vietnamese People: Soldiers' alienation from Vietnamese culture and people
- Reality, Illusion, and the Blurring of Time: How O'Brien mixes time, dreams, and reality
- Conclusion: An Anti-War Novel Without Resolution: War's lasting damage and the novel's open ending
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What makes this paper effective
- Integrates direct quotations from both the novel and secondary critics to support each analytical point, grounding interpretation in textual evidence.
- Consistently connects narrative techniques — O'Brien's blurring of time, dream, and reality — back to their thematic purpose, showing an understanding of how form serves meaning.
- Addresses multiple layers of the novel: psychological, political, and cultural, giving the analysis breadth without losing focus.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates effective use of literary analysis through close reading. Rather than merely summarizing plot, the writer identifies specific authorial choices — such as the listing of dead characters at the novel's opening and the deliberate confusion of chapter headings — and explains what interpretive purpose each serves. This moves the analysis beyond description toward argument.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with an introduction to O'Brien's thematic concerns and the novel's premise. It then moves through distinct analytical sections: the role of fantasy and dreams in soldier psychology; critiques of military leadership; the soldiers' alienation from Vietnamese people and culture; and the treatment of reality versus illusion. A brief conclusion ties these threads together around the novel's anti-war argument. Each section is anchored by at least one direct quotation from the novel or scholarly sources.
Introduction: A Novel of War and Imagination
Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato is a powerful and imaginative exploration of the meaning of war and how war affects the soldiers who fight it. O'Brien sees the Vietnam War experience as one that lasted far longer than the actual fighting, and he shows just how devastating war can be to the men and women who endure it. This book is more than a testament against war, however. It is also an engrossing look into the minds and experiences of soldiers, and how they manage to block out the horrors of war by dreaming, fantasizing, and looking inward so they can ignore the realities that constantly surround them.
The novel centers on just one imaginary day in the life of Paul Berlin, a soldier in Vietnam on a bizarre mission. In his dreamlike imagination, he and his comrades are trailing a deserter named Cacciato, who is bent on reaching Paris for the peace talks by walking across Asia and Europe. Ultimately, this engrossing and strange book relies on the past, present, and imagined future to paint a picture of how war affects the men who fight it — far longer than their fighting days. The book won a National Book Award in 1978, and many critics feel it is the finest novel ever written about the Vietnam War.
Dreams and Fantasy as Psychological Survival
Reality is blurred in this novel, and O'Brien purposely constructed the narrative around themes of dreams and fantasy so that the reader would find it difficult to discern what is real and what is illusion. This mirrors the experiences of the soldiers, who often must fantasize about home and family so they do not dwell on the horror and reality of war that constantly surrounds them. For example, Berlin often thinks of his family back home in Iowa, particularly his father, who is a builder. He thinks of the neat and orderly houses his father constructs, with their definite angles and walls, and contrasts them with his experience in Vietnam, which is anything but neat and orderly. One critic notes:
"Berlin (the narrator) and O'Brien have nothing against well-built houses; they simply feel the profound disjunction between those carpentered houses (with floor plans replete with 45- and 90-degree angles, squares, rectangles, isosceles triangles, and reassuring perpendicular relationships) and what was happening to their eroding epistemology in 'America's longest war'" (Ringnalda 92).
The first two pages of the novel list those characters who died, and O'Brien does this deliberately. He wants the reader to immediately understand the real cost of war — that some characters will not be going home, just as many soldiers in Vietnam never returned. The novel is a fantasy, but a fantasy based on the stark reality of war. While it is dreamlike, humorous, and even entertaining at times, it remains distressing. O'Brien does not make light of war itself; he illuminates the ways in which the characters in war cope with its conditions and with the reality that they may not wake up the next morning.
Military Leadership and the Ambiguity of Mission
O'Brien writes from personal war experience, and he shows what the men must endure — not only from the enemy, but from their own leadership. He portrays lieutenants as brash or rigidly bound to discipline regardless of circumstances, and he continually shows that leaders cared more about the mission than about the men. He writes:
"He hoped that someday the men would come to understand this; that effectiveness requires an emphasis on mission over men, and that in war it is necessary to make hard sacrifices. He hoped the men would someday understand why it was required that they search tunnels before blowing them, and why they must march to the mountains without rest. He hoped for this understanding, but he did not worry about it. He did not coddle the men or seek their friendship" (O'Brien 163).
Yet the ultimate question remains: what was the real mission in Vietnam? Paul Berlin cannot figure it out, and it seems most of the leaders cannot figure it out either. It is O'Brien's intention to show that this was an unjust and unwanted war that served no clear purpose in the end. One critic writes that "shortly after this novel was published, he [O'Brien] said that his main concern in it was 'to have readers care about what's right and wrong and about the difficulty of doing right, the difficulty of saying no to a war'" (Froelich 182). The Vietnam War left its participants permanently changed — they endured, but they were altered, and not for the better.
Conclusion: An Anti-War Novel Without Resolution
This engrossing and entertaining novel makes the reader truly think about war, peace, and the gap between the two. It also offers vivid portrayals of the people who fight wars and the people who lead them into battle. It is at once enlightening and depressing, and is difficult to forget once finished. The reader wants to know what really happened to Cacciato, and whether Berlin ever found peace. O'Brien leaves the ending unresolved because the war itself ended the same way — unresolved, and without closure for the Americans who fought there. This is a true anti-war novel because it shows the effects of war on the hearts and minds of the men who fight it, while illustrating the ultimate fruitlessness of war itself.
References
Froelich, Vera P. "O'Brien's Going After Cacciato." Explicator 53.3 (1995): 181–183.
McWilliams, Dean. "Time in O'Brien's Going After Cacciato." Critique 29.4 (1988): 245–255.
O'Brien, Tim. Going After Cacciato: A Novel. New York: Delacorte Press, 1978.
Ringnalda, Don. Fighting and Writing the Vietnam War. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1994.
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