In Going After Cacciato, the audience really begins to understand what Vonnegut was perhaps trying to achieve with his innovative novel, Slaughterhouse Five. I believe O’Brien’s style was more effective, however. O’Brien’s story line reminds me much of the TV show Lost. On the show, Lost, there is a linear sequence of events, and throughout the show, different characters have flashbacks, which clue the audience in to aspects of different characters’ lives and beliefs that currently make up who they are on the island, upon which they are stranded. Many times the characters, and the viewers are confused between what is real and what is fantasy.
Going After Cacciato fits the format of the show well. We tend to see flashbacks -- or flash forwards, depending on how you view it—of the lives of Paul Berlin’s squad during the Vietnam War. And, similar to Lost, the reader has a difficult time understanding what is real. Even though the novel jumps around quite frequently, Tim O’Brien leads the reader on the journey with the characters he has developed. He does this in a way so that the new experiences, which are introduced through flashbacks (or flash forwards), are not fleeting from the minds of the reader seconds after the moment disappears from the story’s plot. While the story continues on in a linear fashion, after the flashback occurs, the experiences we get clued in on continue to develop the plot of the story and sometime help explain a character’s action. This differs from Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse because in that story, the reader has to do all the work, and figure out the connections. Fleeting moments in Vonnegut’s story don’t necessarily impact the plot of the novel directly after they are mentioned.
For this reason, I find Going After Cacciato to be a more compelling story. There is still mystery and there are still connections that I must make on my own, but random events don’t just seem to appear. Everything O’Brien writes has some relevance to the plot at that moment in the story. Further, O’Brien’s style - with use of language and descriptive imagery - makes his story, and the experiences woven in to it, much more cohesive and powerful as one uniform plot, versus going off on seemingly unrelated tangents, like Vonnegut.
Which story do you like better? Do you prefer Vonnegut or O'Brien's style of story telling?
