English 015 - Americans Abroad
4E: O'Brien
The Wrong Outlook
Category: 4E: O'Brien | Zac Milner
Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato and Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky present two opposite characters coping with the effects of war. The difference between Paul Berlin in O’Brien’s novel and Port in Bowles’s can be seen in their responses to war. Port’s “war stories” reflect the idea that “one never...
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Posted by on December 16, 2003 at 04:17 AM
Cacciato: Enemy and Friend
Category: 4E: O'Brien | Tom Lakin
Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato is a psychological novel that explores the effects of the Vietnam War on the minds of its soldiers. The novel’s plot is based on the ruminations of Paul Berlin, a lone soldier on night watch, whose memories and imagination set the scene for a story...
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Posted by on December 15, 2003 at 04:17 PM
Food for Thought
Category: 4E: O'Brien | Karen Tang
In Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato, food helps the soldiers to alleviate the emotional pain from war. The soldiers’ purpose of war is not really to win the war, but to survive another day, and food crucially supports them. Besides the practical side of eating food, which is to...
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Posted by ktang on December 15, 2003 at 04:11 PM
Indifference: A Coping Mechanism
Category: 4E: O'Brien | Ross Stern
The fear of death and the purposelessness accompanied with it plague Paul Berlin’s psyche in Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato. Berlin attempts to escape his fears by using his imagination to desert the Vietnam War; however, Berlin’s flight of imagination has quite the opposite effect. Rather than allowing him to...
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Posted by on December 15, 2003 at 04:08 PM
Who is Paul Berlin?
Category: 4E: O'Brien | Thomas Buehrens
What Spec Four Paul Berlin wanted more than anything else in the war, was to please his father: “At the depot, when the train stopped, he would brush off his uniform and make sure all the medals were in place, and he would step off boldly, boldly, and he would...
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Posted by on December 15, 2003 at 03:42 PM
A Tourist Fantasy
Category: 4E: O'Brien | Matt Nickel
“What about money? Money for hotels and food and train tickets? What about passports? What about the law? Illegal entry, no documents, no military orders, no permits for all the weaponry? What about police and customs agents?” (page 125). Throughout Tim O’Brien’s novel Going After Cacciato, the soldiers are constantly...
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Posted by on December 15, 2003 at 02:04 PM
The Effects of a Story
Category: 4E: O'Brien | Hope Stockton
Whether traveling for business, pleasure, or service, Americans abroad can often be put in an uneasy situation. One method of easing this tension is to avoid the current situation and instead become involved in a different story altogether. The narrators in Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas...
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Posted by on December 15, 2003 at 01:38 PM
Understanding the Land
Category: 4E: O'Brien | Simon Parsons
In Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato, the land plays a significant role, especially for Spec Four Paul Berlin. In the wider scope, during the Vietnam War, the land became the ultimate enemy of the American GI’s. Unpredictable, foreign, and rigid, the land gave a distinct advantage to the native Vietcong,...
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Posted by on December 15, 2003 at 01:06 PM
War Stories
Category: 4E: O'Brien | Meaghan Tanguay
War Stories “What Paul Berlin knew best was the land…He knew the dangerous places and he knew the safe places” (p250). The soldiers of the Third Squad say the land in Nam is their enemy. However, they are misled and the true enemy proves to be their fellow soldier. On...
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Posted by on December 15, 2003 at 12:55 PM
The Loneliness of Vietnam
Category: 4E: O'Brien | Kelsey Abbruzzese
In Going After Cacciato, every man dies alone. Every death is unique, and every death brings relief to the living. After Buff’s death, Paul Berlin “couldn’t fake sadness. It had to be there. If it wasn’t there you couldn’t fake it. You were glad it wasn’t you” (282). Because of...
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Posted by on December 15, 2003 at 12:44 PM
Passports and Identities
Category: 4E: O'Brien | Diana Heald
The United States passport is one of the most popular symbols of American travel abroad. Passports allow travelers to truly assume Western identities and label them as foreigners; traveling without a passport is somewhat suspect, if not illegal. As the travelers in The Sheltering Sky and Going After Cacciato move...
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Posted by on December 15, 2003 at 12:10 PM
Desertion Sparks Retaliation
Category: 4E: O'Brien | Meg Gray
As portrayed in Going After Cacciato by Tim O’Brien, the Vietnam War is brutal and intense. The soldiers are constantly bombarded with images of violence, death, and cruelty. They live helplessly in horrifying conditions: “the rain fed fungus that grew in the men’s boots and socks, and their socks...
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Posted by on December 15, 2003 at 10:33 AM
Opposing Forces
Category: 4E: O'Brien | Andrew Plowman
Going After Cacciato is an adventure novel about war. Tim O’Brien’s character Paul Berlin is torn between two opposing forces: the desire to please his father and the desire to achieve inner peace. Berlin jumps in and out of reality in an attempt to attain an equilibrium between the...
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Posted by aplowman on December 14, 2003 at 09:17 PM
Between Home and the War
Category: 4E: O'Brien | Eric Robinson
In Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato, the Vietnam War induces a high degree of stress on every soldier involved. One of the main sources of frustration for the men is that the conflict lacks any definite purpose. Throughout the novel, characters repeatedly recall how they see no overall rationale...
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Posted by on December 14, 2003 at 04:58 PM
Essay 4 assignment
Category: 4E: O'Brien | Mark Phillipson
Write a structured, argumentative essay about Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato. You may concentrate solely on GAC, or compare an element of it to any text we’ve read in this class. To be safe, make sure your argument is clearing up a mystery, illuminating a subtle cause of events, or...
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Posted by mphillip on December 09, 2003 at 04:40 PM