Going After Cacciato: 3

“To call Going After Cacciato a novel about war is like calling Moby-Dick a novel about whales.”  This quote by the New York Times really stuck out to me.  I read it both before beginning the novel and again after I had completed the novel and it really highlights how differently I perceived the novel once completed, versus at the beginning.  Before reading it, I had this book pinned as another obvious bildungsroman, where there is a particular character who matures and develops into an individual who is able to rationalize and confidently make their own choices.  However, I honestly cannot say I found that in Going After Cacciato, or more particularly, in the character of Paul Berlin as I thought was going to happen.  I kept waiting for it; I kept waiting for a profound moment where Paul Berlin would just tap in to his inner self, but it never happened.  Surprisingly, this was one of my favorite books we have read this semester, but I cannot call it a bildungsroman.  Paul Berlin reflects throughout the book, but all of his reflections seem detached.  Granted, it is war, but I feel like Paul Berlin never actually matures into his own person.  Looking back on his character, I think of him as imaginative and full of possibility, but not as a person who knows himself.  He lives in a dream world where possibility can actually turn to action, but even in his dream world, he is following another person (Cacciato).  I thought this passage was a good representation of Paul Berlin’s character, “Paul Berlin, whose only goal was to live long enough to establish goals worth living for still longer, stood high in the tower by the sea, the night soft all around him, and wondered, not for the first time, about the immense powers of his own imagination.  A truly awesome notion.  Not a dream, an idea.  An idea to develop, to tinker with and build and sustain…It was not a dream.  Nothing mystical or crazy, just an idea.  Just a possibility…A truly splendid idea” (O’Brien 27).