Going After Cacciato by Tim O'Brien

Published 1979 · 338 pages · 93,331 words · about 9 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, War Fiction

How hard is Going After Cacciato to read?

Going After Cacciato scores 65 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 42 out of 100
O'Brien's prose is stripped and direct. Military argot saturates the text — dustoff, klick, laager, ilium, arty — but these terms are immediately clarified by context and action. No invented language, no archaic registers, no specialized intellectual vocabulary. The soldiers speak in American vernacular, and the narrative voice matches their plain idiom.
Sentence structure: 38 out of 100
Short declarative sentences dominate the war chapters ('It was a bad time. Billy Boy Watkins was dead, and so was Frenchie Tucker.'). O'Brien uses rhythmic accumulation and anaphora for emotional effect rather than syntactic complexity. The Observation Post chapters shift into longer, meditative constructions, but these remain grammatically straightforward — clarity is the governing principle throughout.
Abstraction: 62 out of 100
Paul Berlin's interiority presses constantly toward philosophical questions: what is real versus imagined, what is courage, whether desertion can be moral. The Observation Post chapters are pure reflective consciousness, asking 'How, with luck and courage and endurance, they might have found a way.' The novel explicitly announces itself as 'a book about the imagination itself' — but the abstractions are anchored in vivid combat detail, not free-floating theory.
Information density: 55 out of 100
The three-strand structure — observation post vigil, imagined road-to-Paris narrative, and death flashbacks — keeps each scene relatively self-contained, preventing encyclopedic overload. But the layered ontological question (which events happened?) presses on every chapter. Readers must track which narrative strand they are in at any moment, which adds cognitive load beyond a conventionally linear war novel.
Narrative indirection: 78 out of 100
The entire 'Road to Paris' storyline is Paul Berlin's invention during one night's guard duty — explicitly flagged but never fully separated from the real. O'Brien uses the phrase 'a thing that might have happened' as a recurring marker, but the imagined scenes accumulate full novelistic weight. Readers must continuously determine what is happening versus what he's fabricating, without a reliable guide to the boundary.
Symbolic density: 72 out of 100
Cacciato functions as pure symbol — boyish naivety, the moral possibility of desertion, freedom from a war that kills without meaning. Paris is peace, imagination, and the future he will never reach. The observation post is the present tense of fear and duty. These symbolic registers are grounded in concrete action and character rather than pure allegory, placing the novel closer to The Great Gatsby than to Moby-Dick on the literal-to-symbolic scale.
Ironic distance: 58 out of 100
The framing device creates authorial distance — it's all a night-watch daydream — but O'Brien's prose is earnest rather than ironic. The radio exchange offering 'a real bargain on arty this week, two for the price of one' cuts deepest, using consumer-culture language for mass death. Irony surfaces in moments of dark comedy (Lieutenant Corson's dysentery, the men's professional detachment from horror) without becoming the governing mode.
Resolution withholding: 78 out of 100
The central question — does Paul Berlin desert? does imagination constitute moral action? — goes unanswered. The novel ends with Berlin at his post and Cacciato permanently gone; the road-to-Paris narrative collapses without reaching Paris or clarifying what was real. The deaths that haunt the flashbacks are rendered without explanation or judgment. O'Brien withholds closure on every register: military, moral, and ontological.
Structural complexity: 75 out of 100
Three interlocking timelines alternate in unpredictable chapters: the real-time observation post vigil, the imagined road-to-Paris narrative, and flashbacks to actual deaths (Bernie Lynn, Frenchie Tucker, Billy Boy Watkins, Lieutenant Sidney Martin). The reader must hold all three simultaneously and determine their relationship. Significantly more fragmented than standard war fiction but less extreme than Flights or Pedro Paramo, whose structures actively resist assembly.

How Going After Cacciato is regarded

Going After Cacciato holds a literary regard score of 79 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Prizes

Where Going After Cacciato sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (182 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, Going After Cacciato scores 84 out of 100. A second mythos, romance, pulls at it with a weight of 0.3. About the map of stories.

Mode: Ironic
Paul Berlin, whose only goal was to live long enough to establish goals worth living for still longer, stood high in the tower by the sea
Symbol: Formal
What happened, and what might have happened?
Mythos: Irony Phase 4 (Tragic Pathos) (irony iv)
They were all among the dead.
Genre: Novel + Romance
A possibility. A thing that might have happened on the road to Paris.

Where the story of Going After Cacciato takes place

  • Quang Ngai Province, Vietnam War, 1968-1969 (1968 to 1969), the main setting
  • Observation tower, South China Sea coast, Quang Ngai Province, November 1968
  • Americal Division, Alpha Company, Quang Ngai, June-October 1968 (flashbacks)
  • Imagined overland road to Paris: Laos, Mandalay, Delhi, Tehran, Athens, Paris, Oct 1968-Apr 1969 (1968 to 1969)

5 things that are true of Going After Cacciato, with the passage for each

  1. Cacciato's announced destination is exactly 8,600 statute miles away.

    Eight thousand six hundred statute miles, sir. That’s what he told me—eight thousand six hundred on the nose.

  2. On the imagined road, the squad votes 3-2 to continue, and Harold Murphy leaves overnight.

    In the morning, Harold Murphy and his big gun were gone. They continued west without him.

  3. The squad and a refugee girl fall through a hole in the road down into a Viet Cong tunnel complex.

    tumbling down a hole in the road to Paris.

  4. In Tehran the squad watches a public beheading, and the condemned boy dies fixated on a fly on his nose.

    The boy’s tongue was still moving toward his nose when it ended.

  5. When Paul Berlin finds Cacciato in Paris, Cacciato offers no explanation for deserting.

    “Nothing,” Paul Berlin said loudly, almost yelling. “A dummy. No reasons, no answers. Nothing. Just a baby.”

Scenes in Going After Cacciato that Frye would name

40 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Katabasis, A Hole in the Road to Paris
tumbling down a hole in the road to Paris. The whole squad falls into the underworld of the tunnels.
Pathos, Atrocities on the Road to Paris
The boy’s tongue was still moving toward his nose when it ended. The Tehran beheading is a ritual sacrificial death rendered through a mundane detail.
Point of epiphany, The Observation Post
stood high in the tower by the sea, the night soft all around him, and wondered The tower is the place where the real world and the imagined world touch.
Pathos, How Bernie Lynn Died After Frenchie Tucker
Bernie Lynn’s mouth formed a small circle. A bubble appeared, then broke. Bernie Lynn's quiet, ironic death scene in the tunnel mouth.
Sparagmos, Fire in the Hole
Something liquid seemed to run through the center of the village. The fluid burned and ran off into the paddies. The village of Hoi An is torn apart and melted by artillery and white phosphorus.
Pathos, Night March
So they wrapped Billy in a plastic poncho, his eyes still squeezed shut to make wrinkles in his cheeks Billy Boy's death 'of fright' is the founding pathos.

Books that share these scenes with Going After Cacciato

About the author

Tim O'Brien