Use Of Surrealism In Tim O Brien's Going After Cacciato

In Going After Cacciato, Tim O’Brien uniquely combines the gritty reality of combat with a dreamlike, or surrealistic, state. Surrealism is a mean of uniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely that the world of dream and fantasy joins in the everyday rational world. From the beginning of the novel, the surrealistic experiences obviously occurred, but as the story continued, the story went passed surrealism and almost became delusional. The main protagonist, Paul Berlin, tells of a soldier’s journey to escape to Paris and the Third Squad’s mission to capture him. After analyzing O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato the use of surrealism depicts Paul Berlin’s need to escape from the Vietnam War. One state of refuge war occurs at the Observation Post. If the title of the chapter refers to the Observation Post, that chapter actually occurs. And during the first chapter at the observation post, Doc gives an explanation for the Berlin’s surrealistic tendencies, “we’ve all got these biles… Somehow these biles are warping your sense of reality. Follow me? Somehow they’re screwing up your basic perspective” (O’Brien 28). The biles represent the uncertainty the soldiers are facing; therefore, the
He sets a personal deadline to complete the story, which is by dawn. And in Chapter 42, Berlin asks himself “how far Cacciato could take him?” (O’Brien 287). That quotation proves the premise of the storyline is not to see if Cacciato escapes the war, but for how long Berlin could escape. And to meet his personal deadline, Berlin speeds the story along in order to finish it, emphasizing surrealistic experiences. One key fallacy in the story emphasizing the inaccuracies is when Berlin states “money was never a problem, passports were never required” (O’Brien 295). In order to finish the story before dawn, he ignores major issues that would be prevalent in a normal