Going After Cacciato Themes

When Going After Cacciato was published in the late 1970s, critics weren’t sure how to classify its peculiar combination of gritty war realism and fantasy. There are scenes in the novel that seem extremely realistic, scenes that require the suspension of disbelief, and some scenes that are nothing short of impossible—indeed, the plot of the book itself (a group of US soldiers travels all the way from Vietnam to Paris in search of a soldier…

Going After Cacciato takes place during the height of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. While there’s relatively little information about Vietnam in the novel—in fact, it takes more than a hundred pages before the word “Vietnam” is mentioned—it’s important to understand the background of this war, and Tim O’Brien’s experiences in it.

Between the late 1950s and the mid-1970s, the United States gave military and financial aid to its allies in South Vietnam, trying…

Going After Cacciato’s plot and style are occasionally fantastic and far-fetched, but what’s arguably more jarring about the novel is what O’Brien leaves out of the story. At least half a dozen times, O’Brien ends a chapter on a “cliffhanger”—a suspenseful, seemingly unresolvable climax—and then, in the next chapter, flashes forward to a time when the cliffhanger has been inexplicably resolved. Thus, it’s not described how the soldiers find their way out of the…

Arguably the most basic and important theme of Going After Cacciato—the theme on which all others are predicated—is that of survival and self-preservation. While survival seems to be perfectly straightforward—as Doc says, “Don’t get shot”—the novel demonstrates that survival can be a complicated process in which there’s not always a clear, or even a correct, choice.

Survival dictates the most important choices that the novel’s characters make, and yet these choices must themselves be…