He assumes that war is bad and lists situations that could possibly have happened at Vietnam War, although the reader knows that it is a fictional story. The first chapter is a good example for this listing. The novel starts with the following lines:. It was a bad time. Billy Boy Watkins was dead, and so was Frenchie Tucker.
Billy Boy had died of fright, scared to death on the field of battle, and Frenchie Tucker had been shot through the nose. Bernie Lynn and Lieutenant Sidney Martin had died in tunnels. Pederson was dead and Rudy Chassler was dead. Buff was dead. Ready Mix was dead. They were all among the dead. Nevertheless, many people think about reasons and purposes of wars. Are there political, religious or ideological reasons to justify atrocities? To kill deliberately other human beings is an atrocity.
There is no matter of justification of murder. Murder should not justify another murder. There is a scene in the novel that tries to explain the moral aspect in the sense of war. Doc Peret, the squad's medical aide, speaks to Captain Fahyi Rhallon, who is one of the Savak, the Iranian military intelligence service, and explains what war means to him. War has its own reality. War kills and maims and rips up the land and makes orphans and widows.
These are the things of war. Any war. Politics be damned. Sociology be damned. Follow me? The purposes are always the same. The discussion goes on over a few pages.
They debate about the moral purpose of fighting nations of World War Two. Doc Peret has the opinion that the Germans and the Japanese fought well with a bad purpose. After that Doc Peret argues that it was not about to win or justice or purposes, it was about the feeling of the soldiers who fought because they wanted to stay alive.
In the end of the discussion the Iranian captain says that soldiers thought of running away when they were facing death, but purpose, self-respect and fear of a bad reputation would keep them from running away. Studying the Novel: An Introduction. New York: Arnold, , p. Stockholm: Uppsala, , p. Control and its Loss. M Z Mario Zschornack Author.
Add to cart. Table of Contents Introduction I. The Structure of the Novel 1. Plot Threads 2. Switching Perspectives II.
Major Themes 1. Courage and Morality 2. How Narrative Technique and the Theme of Control represent the Theme of Trauma in War Conclusion Bibliography Introduction In film and in literature there are narratives that are portrayed in a special way. He stared inland. Courage and Morality In most cases war novels, like the novels we discussed in the seminar, deal with the theme of courage. The novel starts with the following lines: It was a bad time. The squad's good humor man is Eddie Lazzutti.
Sergeant Oscar Johnson is loved by virtue of his luck, having survived nine combat tours, though his claims that he's from Detroit are not believed by the other men.
Harold Murphy is a heavy gunner who wants to turn back almost from the start, even as the squad quickly leaves the war and its dangers behind. They make visual contact with Cacciato, who seems committed to walking the 8, miles to Paris. Humping to Paris, it was one of those crazy things Cacciato might try. Paul Berlin remembered how the kid had spent hours thumbing through an old world atlas, studying the maps, asking odd questions: How steep were these mountains, how wide was the river, how thick were these jungles?
It was just too bad. A real pity. Like winning the Bronze Star for shooting out a dink's front teeth. Whistling in the dark, always whistling and smiling his frozen white smile. It was silly. It had always been silly, even during the good times, but now the silliness was sad.
It couldn't be done. It just wasn't possible, and it was silly and sad. Paul Berlin pulls arduous middle-hour guard and to occupy his mind, begins imagining the possibilities: what if they pursued Cacciato all the way to Paris?
Spending six days marching through the jungle, the men hold a vote on whether to return to the war or keep going after Caccicato, facing desertion themselves. Harold Murphy disappears in the night, but the others keep going. Crossing into Laos, Stink shoots one of two water buffalo carrying a cart with three women in it, a young English speaking refugee named Sarkin Aung Wan and her two aunts. While Lt. Corson wants to leave the women, Sarkin Aung Wan becomes compelled by the idea of traveling to Paris.
She attaches herself to Paul Berlin and promises she can guide the squad to their destination. The specialist alternates between flights of fancy to remembrances his past: arriving in Chu Lai on June 3 and receiving woefully inadequate survival training, patrolling the villages of the muddy Song Tra Bong, getting lost in the woods as a child while at Indian Guides camp, his father in Fort Dodge, Iowa advising his son that while at war to focus on the good while ignoring the bad.
Paul Berlin attempts this through his elaborate fantasy world. Going After Cacciato is remarkably compelling when it comes to following Paul Berlin through his flesh and blood experiences in Vietnam. There are no straight lines in his stories, which soar and descend like the vital signs on a patient in intensive care. In the afterword, O'Brien maintains that rather than a war novel, he sees Going After Cacciato as a peace novel. Rather than adventure, it is well-calibrated toward the experiences of a soldier, taking us into his world and frame of mind.
The clerk laughed. He couldn't watch. He watched his hands. He made fists of them, opening and closing the fists. His hands, he thought, not quite believing. His hands. Very quickly, the helicopter banked and turned and went down. PFC Paul Berlin smiled. I wanted to get back to the story where something was at stake.
I don't like reading dream sequences and here too, I glazed over portions that take place in India or Afghanistan. Once the squad hits Paris, I was skipping pages. This concept might have been better serviced in a short story and while I recommend the novel for O'Brien's electrifying prose, as a novel, I think it half works. View all 10 comments. These were hard lessons, true, but they were lessons of ignorance: ignorant men, trite truths.
What remained was a simple event. The facts, the physical things. A war like any war. No new messages. Stories that began and ended without transition. No developing drama or tension or direction.
No order. Who wouldn't fantasize about just dropping everything and leaving the These were hard lessons, true, but they were lessons of ignorance: ignorant men, trite truths.
It seems a rational choice: to choose freedom, happiness, liberty. To say cut it, cork it and just run. Leave the swamps of uncertainty, death, and fear behind you. Become a refugee from the carnage of Vietnam. Seek to relocate your tired ass to a place where dumb muthers aren't trying to shoot you.
Find some piece of Earth where you aren't sleeping in holes, crawling into tunnels, worrying about whether the bullet that gets you will be audible. Get the hell out of Dodge. If that was the extent of this novel's vision, it would be a pretty damn good book, but O'Brien tweaks it. He doesn't go for the easy answers.
For every tick he gives you a tock. He finds ambiguity everywhere, conflict over each hill. It isn't a simple moral point to stay or go, to fight or to run. War has its own reality. It will exhaust you and then follow up. This confrontation with fear, death, loyalty, morality, friendship, leading, following, is key. The key to this novel is conflict. The conflict is key. With lyrical beauty, flashbacks, and a magical realism that I've never experienced in a novel about the Vietnam War, O'Brien spins a story that is just that: a yarn, a spin, a giant fantasy race, a road movie, a Moby-Dick, a Danse Macabre, a metaphysical and very modern dance.
It is a story of the good, the bad; those who run and those who follow. It is a literary shadow sculpture built out of the debris of war, the stories and cast-offs the living and the dead. View all 6 comments. Aug 27, Michael rated it it was amazing. Dreamlike story of a quest and an escape from war, of a soldier in Vietnam who decides he's had enough and begins hiking to Paris, and of the soldiers tasked with bringing him back. The horror and absurdity and sheer unreality of war are on full display in this moving novel.
View all 4 comments. Oct 03, J. Tim O'Brien is such an impressive American writer. More of a meditation on madness and war, this book absolutely blew me away.
View 2 comments. May 03, Dan rated it liked it Shelves: military-fiction. The ease with which he elicits emotions and the deftness with which he changes them is amazing. When he describes a chopper ride into a hot LZ you can almost see, hear, and smell the experience. He can make painful passages like Chapter 44 such an essential part of the story that you welcome the pain. Best of all is his ability to surprise you time after time with subtle twists and turns The Things They Carried is still O'Brien's best, in my opinion, but Going After Cacciato is not far behind.
Best of all is his ability to surprise you time after time with subtle twists and turns. Everybody should be reading Tim O'Brien's writing. View 1 comment. My first opinion of this book is that I found it disappointing.
Since O'Brien had experienced all the horrors of being an infantry soldier I was expecting a gritty account of a soldier's life. How in the world this brilliant young man becomes an Infantry soldier is puzzling since only the lowest I.
A soldier with the lowest I. The story is told by Private Paul Berlin, a new arrival to his infantry company as he muses over his past experiences in Vietnam while relating his present circumstances.
Berlin's present storyline is confusing to say the least as a few members of his company are tasked with finding the AWOL soldier, Cacciato, who is heading overland for Paris to escape the horrors of war. The whole company had been traumatized as their buddies have one by one met horrible deaths in battle and Cacciato has apparently gone over the deep end.
As Berlin relates the current task of finding Cacciato he muses over each and every death in gory, horrific detail. Things become very confusing as they continue their quest into Laos without reporting to their commander where they are going.
They liberally begin to spend money all along the journey chasing Cacciato to Paris. Where is this money coming from? This and other peculiarities made me start wondering: Are they really dead and don't know it? Have the horrors of war made Berlin lose his mind and is he relating his tale while undergoing psychiatric therapy?
Anybody remember the TV series "Dallas" and Bobby's dream season? I felt a little cheated with this ending to be honest and couldn't help but think is that all there is? Most of this novel is set during the present with Berlin's dream sequence, which was WAY too long, leaving me wishing the author had included his audience a lot sooner than the last few pages as to the reality of Berlin's situation. Anyone curious about the Vietnam War will find this book interesting and educational as O'Brien makes that era come to life with realistic characters that are unique and memorable.
View all 17 comments. Jun 07, Amanda rated it really liked it Shelves: war , vietnam , blog. This book is not for everyone. If you have trouble suspending disbelief or issues with magical realism, walk away now or read O'Brien's The Things They Carried. However, if you can just sit back and enjoy the ride as a master storyteller blurs the lines between reality and fantasy in such a way that there are no hard and fast truths which is the point in most of O'Brien work , then you will most likely enjoy the experience.
A unit is dispatched to hunt Cacciato down, but encounters a number of bizarre twists and turns along the way think Catch meets Alice in Wonderland. The narrative is split into three distinct time periods and told from the point of view of Paul Berlin. These distinct narratives focus on Berlin's first few months in the war, the hunt for Cacciato, and one night after the hunt for Cacciato is over this occurs while Berlin is on night watch and thinking back to the hunt for Cacciato.
The problem with making sense of the narrative comes from Paul Berlin himself--a young soldier ill-equipped to deal with the violence and atrocity of war, he uses his imagination to while away the tedious hours, as well as to re-create traumatic events with which he's not ready to cope. The point, however, is not what actually happens to Cacciato in fact, upon a second reading, I found myself questioning the conclusion I came to after reading it for the first time , but how Berlin wisely or unwisely chooses to deal with events that are beyond his ability to control.
Cross posted at This Insignificant Cinder So I read this book almost 8 years ago in the book format and gave it three stars. And I just finished it in September in the audible format and I am upping it to four stars. The book was first published in and apparently the audible was finished in I found the book to be at times dragging and at other times dazzling. It really improved once I figure it out the switching back-and-forth from real Time to Real imagining.
There is not so much of the jungle fighting that you get used So I read this book almost 8 years ago in the book format and gave it three stars. There is not so much of the jungle fighting that you get used to in Vietnam war stories. But there are plenty of paddies and enough war is hell blood and guts. There are some excellent moments of reflection. I am plenty glad that I listen to this book so long after I first read it.
I have to admit I have no recollection of reading this book other than the words that I wrote at that time. Also an interesting readers guide at the end of the Kindle book. There was a joke about Oscar. Some of the jokes were about Cacciato. Dumb as a bullet, Stink said. Dumb as a month-old oyster fart, said Harold Murphy.
This book is no joke. But you may find yourself laughing in spite of knowing that nothing in it is funny. Surreal page after page, dreams and nightmares, confusion and terror. All of these: strange, weird, odd, unreal, dreamlike, fantastic, bizarre. Here is what some other GR reviewers had to say about this book: Brilliant, hallucinatory and hypnotic, the narrative jumps around, jumbling continuity, reality, fear, duty and dreams as it deftly and completely messes with your head.
You have to learn to drift along with the often illogical story but to be prepared for regular bits of realism. What does it take to be a heroic soldier in a war zone? The blond-headed lieutenant watched him climb.
He saw the boy as a soldier. Maybe not yet a good soldier, but still a soldier. He saw him as part of a whole, as one of many soldiers pressed together by the force of mission. The lieutenant was not stupid. He knew these beliefs were unpopular. He knew in his society, and many of the men under his own command, did not share them. But he did not ask his men to share his views, only to comport themselves like soldiers. He secretly urged him on. For the sake of mission, yes, and for the welfare of the platoon.
A bit of rah rah! And what did it all mean? After the war, perhaps, he might return to Quang Ngai. Years and years afterward. Return to track down the girl with gold hoops through her ears. Bring along an interpreter. And then, with the war ended, history decided, he would explain to her why he had let himself go to war. And who did? Who really did? Oh, he had read the newspapers and magazines. Who really knew? So he went to the war for reasons beyond knowledge.
Because he believed in law, and law told him to go. Because it was a democracy, after all, and because LBJ and the others had rightful claim to their offices. He went to the war because it was expected. Because not to go was to risk censure, and to bring embarrassment on his father and his town. Sidney Martin has been professionally trained as a soldier, and on the day before the mountain battle, Lt. Martin is watching the troops and thinking about the duties of a leader in war.
The story begins and ends in Vietnam during America's war with that country. In Paul Berlin's imagination, his squad travels several thousand miles, from Vietnam to Paris, with stops in Browse all BookRags Study Guides. All rights reserved. Toggle navigation. Sign Up. What order do the chapters go in? O'Brien structures his presentation of Paul and what happens to him in three interwoven threads: Now, then, and the whole journey as mythis experience. Going After Cacciato Question. The soldiers were hampered by their surroundings, the climate, and the unknown.
Metaphorically, this comes to portray the animosity of
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