Background Notes on Tim O’Brien and Going After Cacciato

"Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story."
- Tim O’Brien

Tim O'Brien is from small town Minnesota. He was born in Austin, Minnesota, on October 1, 1946, a birth date he shares with several of his characters, and grew up inWorthington, "Turkey Capital of the World." He now resides in Austin, TX, and teaches Creative Writing and Introduction to Fiction at Texas State University.

After graduating from Macalester Collegein 1968, O’Brien found himself with a BA in political science and a draft notice.

O'Brien was against the Vietnam War, but he reported for service and was sent to Vietnam with what has been called the "unlucky" American division due to its involvement in the My Lai massacre in 1968, an event which figures prominently in his novel In the Lake of the Woods. He was assigned to 3rd Platoon, A Co., 5th Batt. 46th Inf., as an infantry foot soldier. O'Brien's tour of duty was from 1969-70. The war itself serves as the backdrop and inspiration for the majority of his works, including his two most recognized pieces of literature: Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried.

After Vietnam he became a graduate student at Harvard (No doubt he was one of very few Vietnam veterans there at that time). Having the opportunity to do an internship at the Washington Post, he eventually left Harvard to become a newspaper reporter. O'Brien's career as a reporter gave way to his fiction writing after publication of his memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Send Me Home.His method of blending his actual experiences with made-up ones would earn him accolades as a writer and pave the way for his success as a writer of fiction and literary nonfiction.

One attribute in O'Brien's works is the blur between fiction and reality; labeled "verisimilitude" (the appearance of being true), his works contain actual details of the situations he experienced while in Vietnam; while that is not unusual, his conscious, explicit, and metafictional (Literally “beyond fiction”*) approach to the distinction between fiction and fact is extraordinary. In the chapter "Good Form" in The Things They Carried, O'Brien casts a distinction between "story-truth" (the truth of fiction) and "happening-truth" (the truth of fact or occurrence), writing that "story-truth is sometimes truer than happening-truth." Story truth is emotional truth; thus, the feeling created by a fictional story is sometimes truer than what results from reading the facts. Certain sets of stories in The Things They Carried seem to contradict each other, and certain stories are designed to "undo" the suspension of disbelief created in previous stories; for example, "Speaking of Courage" is followed by "Notes," which explains in what ways "Speaking of Courage" is fictive.

In the quixotic(foolishly impractical especially in the pursuit of ideals; marked by rash lofty romantic ideas or extravagantly chivalrous action)Going After Cacciato, O’Brien once again blurs the line between reality and fiction. He writes the novel based on his actual war experiences in Vietnam, yet he writes and structures the work in a disjointed, almost dream-like manner, consistently causing readers to ask, “Is what I’m reading really happening?”(In fact, O’Brien begins the novel with the epigraph “Soldiers are dreamers,” immediately alerting readers that what they encounter may not necessarily be reality. And, at one point in the work, O’Brien even has his characters fall into what seems like a never-ending hole, a clear allusion to Alice’s fall through the rabbit hole into the surreal dream-like realm of Wonderland).

Going After Cacciato is a story of flight – literally and figuratively – and the power of imagination/pretending. According to O’Brien, he based his novel not only on his war experiences, but on Moses and his flight through Egypt: “For example, the Exodus story is really a flight story – a running away story, a freedom story. I wrote a story like it, Going After Cacciato. It's a flight story, a seeking of freedom from the horrors of war. In the case of the Exodus story in the Bible, it's about freedom from the horrors of slavery” (It can be argued that the soldiers’ trek in the story parallels the slaves being led out of Egypt; they are slaves to an unjust war and an uncaring government). Remember, in literature flight equals freedom, and this includes flights of the imagination. The characters in the work take flight (flee) not only to escape the horrors of war, but, more importantly, some take flight (physically and mentally) to escape themselves and what they have become. For war has the capability to destroy men not just physically but emotionally and mentally (the devastating effects of war are an underlying theme of the work). According to O’Brien, though, war may destroy and kill, but imagination creates and saves. In fact, in Going After Cacciato O’Brien seems to postulate that imagination has the power to save us from the scariest beast of all – ourselves.

*Metafiction is a kind of fiction which self-consciously addresses the devices of fiction. It usually involves irony and is self-reflective. It can be compared to presentational theatre in a sense; presentational theatre does not let the audience forget they are viewing a play, and metafiction does not let the readers forget they are reading a work of fiction. It poses questions about the relationship between fiction and reality.

Some common devices of metafiction include:

-A novel about a person writing a novel.

-A novel about a person reading a novel.

-A story that addresses the specific conventions of story, such as title, paragraphing or plots.

-A non-linear novel, which can be read in some order other than beginning to end.

-Narrative footnotes, which continue the story while commenting on it.

-A novel in which the author is a character.

-A story that anticipates the reader's reaction to the story.

-Characters who do things because those actions are what they would expect from characters in a story.

-Characters who express awareness that they are in a work of fiction.

Cacciato – In Italian, the name means “hunted.”

Paul – small; an apostle in the Bible

Berlin –one who came from Berlin (an uncultivated field)