Going After Cacciato

At the center of Going After Cacciato is Paul Berlin, a prototypical American grunt in Viet Nam, who relates a story that is a mix of his current location at a sentry post near the South China Sea, his memories of combat, and the fantastic flight to Paris. Ostensibly, ...Cacciatio is about a squad of infantry who chase after a naïve grunt named Cacciato, who is trying to flee to Paris.

What is notable is that O'Brien's writing style smacks of literary Modernism, using synchronic time to blur the distinctions between events, placing the emphasis on Paul Berlin's perceptions and not upon what really happened.

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 (287).

The most notable themes in Going After Cacciato are those of morality. As can be expected in a place like Viet Nam, these sorts of things can get pretty hazy. Sitting in a bar in Tehran (en route to Paris), two grunts discuss it.

The point is that war is war no matter how it is perceived. 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. So when I say there's nothing new to tell about Nam, I'm saying it was just a war like every war. Politics be damned. Sociology be damned.

[...]

True, it's sometimes hard to figure out what the hell's going on, but I'll wager that troops at Hastings or the Bulge had the same problem. I mean, if they stopped to think about it--what the fuck am I fighting for?--if they did that, I'll bet they came up as confused and muddleheaded as anybody in Nam. And what about all the millions of soldiers who have fought bravely on behalf of bad purposes, evil aims? The Nazis, the Japs. They fought damned well (176-177).

O'Brien has said, "For me, the purpose of writing fiction is to explore moral quandaries. The best fiction is almost always the fiction which has a character having to make a difficult moral choice [...] My concerns have to do with the abstractions: ... How does one do right in an evil situation?" Writing as someone who has been somewhat displaced by his experiences in Viet Nam, O'Brien is attempting to move beyond the knee-jerk response to the physical and psychological violence of warfare and take from the experience some measure of goodness.