Cacciato, an American soldier who is unintelligent but self-sufficient, happy, and untroubled by the larger questions of the war, goes AWOL.

The courage it takes to chase one's dreams is a recurring theme which is often expressed through Paul Berlin's reveries.

Typical of many stories that deal with themes of psychological trauma, Going After Cacciato is ambiguous about the nature, order, and reality of events that occur.

The issue, then, is understanding O'Brien's blend of the believable and the unbelievable, and incorporating it into our comprehension of the book... One of the most common phrases critics used to describe Going After Cacciato, at least at the time, was 'magical realism.

It was all he wanted -- a genuine miracle to confound natural law, a baffling reversal of the inevitable consequences.

Open-faced and naive and plump, Cacciato lacked the fine detail, the refinements and final touches, that maturity ordinarily marks on a boy of seventeen years.

[6]He also sees Cacciato's face in the moon floating above the squad[7] and as "fuzzy, bobbing in and out of mist" (p. 10) -- pretty much in any environment in which Paul Berlin finds himself.

When the men first leave their post and first spot Cacciato in the mountains, they see through binoculars that he opens his mouth to speak; then thunder roars.

"[4] Richard Freedman, writing in The New York Times and suggesting that Cacciato is a Christ figure, said, "By turns lurid and lyrical, Going After Cacciato combines a surface of realistic war reportage as fine as any in Michael Herr's recent Dispatches with a deeper feel -- perhaps possible only in fiction -- of the surrealistic effect war has on the daydreams and nightmares of the combatants.

Freedman sees influences by Ernest Hemingway and says, "...far from being a high-minded, low-voltage debate on the rights and wrongs of Vietnam, Going After Cacciato is fully dramatized account of men both in action and escaping from it.