The subversion of authority in Tim O'Brien's Going after Cacciato : a study of story and discourse
Date
1990
Authors
Stewart, Daniel
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Abstract
Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato is acclaimed as one of the most significant novels to emerge from the American experience in the Vietnam War. It is noted for its blend of realism and fantasy, and for its complex narrative structure that creates textual uncertainty and ambiguity. This study examines the different ways in which the novel undermines the cultural ideology of authority and considers how the questioning of authority is related to the American intervention in Vietnam.
Part One discusses the subversion of authority in the text's narrative content or what structuralists refer to as the level of "story." On this level, Going After Cacciato tends to revolve around two central events that represent a serious challenge to military authority: the desertion of the soldier Cacciato, and the "£ragging" of an unpopular officer. By extension, these incidents also represent a challenge to the cultural assumptions which led America into the war. Part One explores how the portrayal of these events subverts authority by its dramatizing the conflict between cultural expectations associated with wartime military obligation and the rights of the individual to personal dignity and security, and by questioning the moral legitimacy of the American presence in Vietnam.
Part Two discusses how the novel undercuts narrative authority on the level of "discourse," that is, the expression plane or the way the narrative content is communicated. Narrative authority is subverted by a structural design that employs various techniques such as fragmentation and chronological disordering to generate interpretive uncertainty. Cacciato also problematizes "truth" through metafictional self-reflexivity and the dynamics of storytelling that systematically erode distinctions between "reality" and fantasy, memory and imagination. The text's preoccupation with storytelling draws attention to the textualization of knowledge and demonstrates how the communication of experience is tentative and provisional.
But the subversion of authority in Going After Cacciato is never complete. In both story and discourse, the novel is characterized by a paradoxical postmodern double movement that both establishes and undercuts authority. The thesis discusses the operation of this phenomenon and considers how it relates to our comprehension of the Vietnam War.
In conclusion, Cacciato is seen as an equivocal novel that oscillates between authority and resistance, fact and fiction. This undecidability is expressed in the final scene of the novel that leaves Cacciato's fate indefinite and open to conjecture. While the deliberate ambiguities of Going After Cacciato seem to evade the very real political issue of America ' s guilt in Vietnam, the novel's foregrounding of the operation of power systems and power relations in society exposes the domination cultural ideology has over the individual.