Style and Technique
O’Brien’s craft is often compared to that of Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Heller, other twentieth century American writers who shared the project of telling a true war story. Like them, O’Brien creates a carefully controlled net of unstated meaning. Through understatement, oddities of style, and the juxtaposition of superficially unrelated information, O’Brien shows and does not tell. Much is implied. By cooperatively reconstructing the implicit material, the reader actively participates in cocreating the story. Because of this, readers may find themselves more engaged with O’Brien’s work than with other, more explicit, texts.
For example, at the beginning of the story, Doc Peret must say three times that Cacciato has gone AWOL before he gets any response from his lieutenant. The unexplained repetition requires the reader to hypothesize a reason and, through this process, information about the lieutenant’s mental state is conveyed. Perhaps he is emotionally exhausted. Perhaps he does not want to hear the news: It will require action on his part, and it foretells a tragedy for one of his men.
Readers can never know for sure that they have decoded the implied material correctly, so the understanding of implicit texts is always more uncertain than the understanding of explicit ones. O’Brien has written elsewhere that chronic uncertainty was one of the defining characteristics of the Vietnam soldier’s experience and must be created for the reader in any story that purports to be faithful to the reality of the war. In this way, his highly implicit style not only serves to invite active engagement on the reader’s part but also mimics the confusion and uncertainty of the soldiers whose story he is trying to tell.
Another way in which O’Brien strives to tell a true war story is in his attention to the physical details that make up the life of a soldier. The rain, the mud, the fungus that grows in the socks, the jungle-rot that attacks the skin, the exact sound of a booby-trap wire being tripped, the precise physical sensation of bowel-loosening terror—these are the facts of a Vietnam foot soldier’s life, and these are the details that enrich the texture and reality of “Going After Cacciato.” Through careful sensory detail, O’Brien attempts the impossible task of telling the true story of Vietnam so clearly that even those who were not there may stand in witness.
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