SOURCE: "Pluralities of Vision: Going After Cacciato and Tim O'Brien's Short Fiction," in America Rediscovered: Critical Essays on Literature and Film of the Vietnam War, edited by Owen W. Gilman, Jr., and Lorrie Smith, Garland Publishing, Inc., 1990, pp. 213-24.

In the following essay, Calloway contrasts different versions of the same events and characters represented in O'Brien's fiction in terms of the author's concern with the "problematic nature of reality."

Tim O'Brien's second novel, the critically acclaimed Going After Cacciato, has long been considered one of the best works to have emerged from the canon of Vietnam War literature, due in part to its emphasis on the subjective nature of perception. Like other postmodernist writers, O'Brien questions the problematic nature of reality itself, a process that engages both the protagonist and the reader. Can there be any definite objective reality in the war? Does absolute truth really exist? Like...