Toward its end, Going After Cacciato quotes from Yeats's "Meditations in Time of Civil War"—"We had fed the heart on fantasies, / The heart's grown brutal from the fare." The words are said in a fantasy-scene, by a character who exists only in another character's mind, and it seems an apt motto for a novel about private dreaming in the midst of the public disaster of Vietnam….

[Going After Cacciato] goes well beyond mere disillusionment about war and national policy. It is a book about the imagination itself, one which both questions and celebrates that faculty's way of resisting the destructive powers of immediate experience….

Berlin's dream-story can never quite accept personal freedom and peace as its proper ending. On the verge of finding Cacciato in Paris, the squad agrees that they must capture him and take him back, and even Berlin, who's invented a Vietnamese girl to...