A study guide for Tim O'Brien's "Going After Cacciato"

By Gale and Cengage

A study guide for Tim O'Brien's "Going After Cacciato", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students series. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: May 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535841085

Book preview

11

Going After Cacciato

Tim O'Brien

1978

Introduction

Going after Cacciato is a classic of Vietnam War literature. Published in 1978, it won the 1979 National Book Award for fiction. Loosely based on Tim O'Brien's experience as an infantry soldier in Vietnam, the novel follows Paul Berlin, a young soldier who is terrified and confused by his experience in the war. During one long night, Berlin keeps watch in an observation tower beside the South China Sea. The novel takes place in three different narratives with three different time frames that intertwine throughout the novel.

The first thread is the narrative of the observation tower and Berlin's night watch, during which he decides not to wake the soldier who is supposed to relieve him but to keep watch all night over his fellow soldiers. As he keeps watch, Berlin imagines a fantastical story of what might have happened had his fellow soldier, the deserter Cacciato, completed his escape with the squad chasing him all the way to Paris. In between the narrative of Berlin's night in the tower and his imagined narrative of the journey to Paris is his attempt to make sense of the breakdown he suffered when the squad caught up to Cacciato. When the flares went up, Berlin lost control of himself, firing his weapon wildly before blacking out and fouling himself.

Much of the novel concerns Berlin's attempt to reconstruct the chronology of events that constitute his actual experience of the war. It is by imagining an escape from the war that he manages to construct a coherent narrative for himself of his actual experience in Vietnam, an experience to which he returns through this act of imaginative reconstruction.

Author Biography

O'Brien was born William Timothy O'Brien on October 1, 1946, in Austin, Minnesota, to William T. O'Brien, an insurance salesman, and Ava E. O'Brien, an elementary school teacher. When he was ten, the family moved from Austin to Worthington, Minnesota. Worthington has about 10,000 inhabitants, a community college, and Lake Okabena and, because of the abundance of poultry farms in the area, is self-proclaimed as the Turkey Capital of the United States

O'Brien had a classic midwestern childhood. He played football, golf, and baseball on a team coached by his father, although he admits he was not a good athlete, which set him apart from his peers. After high school, O'Brien attended Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he majored in political science and was the student-body president during his senior year. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude.

Two weeks after graduation, he received his draft notice. O'Brien was conflicted about the war. Both of his parents had been active participants in World War II, his father in the Pacific theater and his mother in the women's volunteer arm of the U.S. Navy. When O'Brien was drafted, he considered defecting to Canada, but as he wrote in a 1994 essay for the New York Times about returning to Vietnam, his parents' service, as well as the prospect of rejection: by my family, my country, my friends, my hometown convinced him he had to go. He has on numerous occasions referred to this as an act of cowardice.

O'Brien went to Vietnam in 1969 and served in the U.S. Army Fifth Battalion, 46th Infantry, known as the Americal Division. He was sent into the Pinkville area, where, in the spring of 1968, the United States forces massacred an estimated 500 Vietnamese citizens in the village of My Lai, many of them women, children, and infants. When O'Brien was sent over, news of the massacre had not yet become public, and he told D. J. R. Bruckner of the New