Going After Cacciato

Waking up from the American Dream in Going later on Cacciato (Tim OBrien) What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? lone(prenominal) the monstrous anger of the guns. Only the stuttering rifles rapid rattle Can patter out their hasty orisons. (from Anthem for Doomed Youth, Wilfred Owen) Sassoons epitaph replete(p)ly Soldiers argon stargazeers at the beginning of the story functions as a rule of thumb signaling the shape the novel will bespeak. It does not exactly hired man with brutal horror, it is imagination. Reality and romance, fact and imagination are interwoven.The choice of Siegfried Sassoon suggests the majuscule war, the English experience of war, which can be compared to the American Vietnam experience, for it had the same continue total disorientation and national trauma because of lost values. This novel thusly deals, in story and body structure, with the war experience, scarcely also with the US societys settle on that war through the ordinary soldi er. The common g meett raised the question how to act properly in this horrible situation, in which he even did not hit the hay whether his presence was morally in effect(p)ified or not.Yet he concluded that, although he k unused this war was just as berserk as either other war, he should not run off from his duty. He stayed in the war, because of his personal obligations to society. Not out of idealism, but merely because his community expected him to. In novels dealing with Vietnam we often see veterans glide slope foul into the American society ( handle in Caputos Indian Country), but hither we are confronted with the country itself. The novel Going after Cacciato deals with the journey to genus Paris an American soldier fantasizes about.It is November 1968 and Spec. Four capital of Minnesota Berlin is in his observation rear in Quang Ngai, Vietnam, by the South China Sea, performing his tour of duty, which lasts 365 days for the common grunt, the foot soldier he is. H e feels he has follow to Nam in another mode than soldiers had gone to the Second World War and to Korea. His lieutenant, Lt Corson had been in Korea, and he was looking back to it with nostalgia In Korea, by God, the battalion standardizedd us. Know what I mean? They akind us. Respect, thats what it was. And it was a decently war ( The troubles this Nobody likes nobody. (p. 134) New were the blindness of war, the inertia, drugs were taking over, the creation of the new word fragging, i. e. killing a superiour officer It all illustrated this war was supposed to be different from those wars in which capital of Minnesota Berlins ancestors had fought, with in their mind the American dream. However, Vietnam was not different at all. Soldiers who enthousiastically started their participation in Vietnam, were as readily traumatized by the killings, as any other soldiers. A war like any other war.Stories that began and ended without transition. No developing drama or tension or dir ection. No order. (p. 255) When capital of Minnesota realizes this, the main question for him is how to catch out his own place in it. As he does not know an anwer, the possibility, or rather the necessity of dreaming something else in the introduce of horror, is brought to Vietnam. He starts to guess about Cacciato. This bloke fishes in the worlds Great Lake Country where e very(prenominal)body says thither is no fish. He duti luxurianty goes through all the motions and all of a sudden het gets out, and Paul is intrigued.Pauls squad is sent to go after Cacciato. They are pursual the unmarked character and find him much and more almost a holy character, less defined as they go along. Finding him a friendly leader almost, they follow him. From soldier among soldiers, he develops into a friendly symbolical figure pointing the way. The seductiveness of Cacciato leads them on. He sheds his war implements. He is that annoying, different, seperate chap who bounces the ball, who nobod y can trace and think of, who does not actually exist, he has not even got a first constructCacciato, that just fulfills. Going after Cacciato means discharge after a dream, following that dream, but it can also mean going after to actually get that dream. Time and clock time again there is this ambiguity of going on the hunt after Cacciato, or following the Italian on desertion there is the choice between honesty and dream for Paul. Cacciato, who nobody has actually seen, has hit upon an idea which his indeterminance made possible, and it speaks to the imagination. Paul goes after him, catches him, thus completing his mission, but lets Cacciato make do.Cacciato then leads them through the well-favoured high country, through orderly Mandalay, normal Delhi, to a beheading in gruesome Tehran, all the way via Athens to Paris the change of scene symbolizes the hope Paul first feels, gradually turning into despair and total confusion. His experiences on the way show Paul that he cannot actually abandon the war behind. Cant get international from it, Doc mumblight-emitting diode. You try, you run like hell, but you just cant get away. Its the truth. (p. 178) Arrived in Paris and having hugged, outbursts of rain and th downstairs announce the forthcoming difficulties.Reality soon makes the squad go and hunt down Cacciato again. Oscar, the street smart Detroit black, insists on the Real Politik of getting Cacciato to save their own skins from punishment for desertion. They put one across to arrest Cacciato and abandon their dream, because society expects them to do so. Oscars right, Doc said, and sighed. You cant get away with this shit. the realities always cath you. But maybe. No maybes. Reality doesnt work that way. (p. 275) Paul Berlin is not ready yet to stop Cacciato and lets him escape again. Choosing reality and turning his back on the dream are, however, close at hand.In the promotion scene Paul remembered himself answering questions to a c ommittee that scared the living daylights out of him. why do we labor the war? they asked him, but at the same time the committee told him the answer to win. Very afraid, he repeated this and got the job. Paul then realizes society urges him to do as he is told, and not to think for himself, as society will do that for him. He has to conform and closed up. He knows this cannot be right, but on the other hand his fantasized run for Paris would have been an equally unhappy experience to him in reality.For thaumaturgy it had been all along. His dream of going after the lightdom and peace Cacciato conduct him to, had all been a dream within a dream. The latter dream was dreamt in order to avoid having to solve the dilemma of staying in or running away from the war. He finally woke up from that dream, for now he had found the answer he had to go through it trying to escape and fleeing from social obligations was not according to his background, his personality and his beliefs. I fe ar what aptitude be thought of me by those I love. I fear the button of their respect.I fear the loss of my own reputation. Reputation, as read in the eye of my father and mother, the people in my situationtown, my friends. I fear being an outcast. (p. 286) The novel is structured round terzetto elements that are in accordance with the three different activities of Paul Berlins conscience reflection, imagination and memories he is wondering how people die in the war, he thinks about going to Paris and he stands on guard. The killings of war and their stories are told non-chronologically, as if they happen at this very moment.Paul Berlin tries to get things straight, tries to get a chronological list of the men killed. He needs order, wants to keep it straight, but he has problems with this. The structure of the novel reflects the structure of any war it is confusing and without order, sometimes a mess and going in different directions. The hero solves this problem by making up a story himself. It is a story in the third person, told as a reality, told almost as observed by an omniscient observer, who has no involvement but at the same time we know they are Paul Berlins imaginations.All of a sudden this woman comes up in the he-country of Vietnam alone in imagination a beautiful girl is possible there. By the end of the novel the reader knows that the squad neer went after Cacciato any further than the hill, and that Paris only denoted the illusion of seeking the Far West. In reality they had always been in the Far East. The unlimited possiblities of the Imagination, as that of the unify States and its American Dream as well, fail in the reality of the Vietnam War.Berlin, whose name points to the American commitment to saveguard freedom (by setting up the airbridge to the city of Berlin under siege of the Soviets in 1948) finds himself in a situation in which the values, ideals and intentions of the unite States no longer have the absolute meaning they seemed to have in previous wars. In Paris, the heart of Western civilization, Paul Berlin lacked the courage to free himself, even in his dreams, and reality took over No question, it was all waste from the start. None of the roads led to Paris. p. 203) He has to accept that he and his comrades would be the very deserters, who would flee from the original idea of the American Dream, that told them that the only way if you really wanted to overcome all problems is to keep on trying. Only Cacciato, who with his childish simplicity and innocence, with his optimism and his individual power embodies the mythical American loner, he frees himself from the society that tells him what to do. He is, however, lost, together with these values, in the Vietnam War.The American Dream had led young Americans into a place where they had no right to go. They were supposed to fight and defeat the Viet Cong to serve the American nation, but in this war, just like in any other, confusion and death wer e the real victors the war served no American purpose at all. The lesson Paul learned from the Vietnam War was faraway from significant Don never get shot. There it is, said Eddie Lazzutti. Never. Don never get shot. (p. 254) He might have learned that back home in the US as well.So in Vietnam this trail West was a fake one. In Fort Dodge you could build good hale houses, in the wilds of Wisconsin you fraternized with your father who told you, back there, to look for positive things in the war. In Nam, however, there is only the squad, and all of a sudden this boom, like in Billy Boy Watkins story, the case of the grunt dying of fright. It is the last war story, the story of Vietnam. So Paul starts dreaming his own dream, he rejects the American dream. He nevertheless does not reject reality.Like Arthur Dimmesdale in The crimson Letter by Nathanial Hawthorne, he does not want to give in to the code of society, but does not want to be lured into the moral wilderness either. He wants to stay part of that society, although he knows its claims are based on air. it is this social power, the threat of social consequences, that stops me from making a full and complete break. (p. 286) However nasty the war may be, it is better to take part than to be isolated, so Paul Berlin ends his dream, in order to face reality. bibliography Going after Cacciato (Tim OBrien) Walking Point American Narratives of Vietnam (Thomas Myers)