His subsequent stories and novels, including the National Book Award--winning
Going After Cacciato (1978), have all featured the Vietnam War as either a real or a ghostly presence. O'Brien examines the wrenching transformation of sense and sensibility in fictions that are evocative, challenging meetings of imagination and memory, of the created and the re-created, of the impossible and the possible.
Critics have often placed O'Brien within the somewhat limited category of "war writer." Milton J. Bates, assessing O'Brien's ongoing obsession with the myth of courage, places him "in the tradition of our great war novelists -- Crane, Hemingway, Jones, Mailer, and Vonnegut." In Philip D. Beidler's Re-Writing America, Philip Caputo, himself a Pulitzer Prize--winning Vietnam writer whose memoir A Rumor of War reveals strong affinities with O'Brien's, finds his peer standing "solidly within the tradition of midwestern soldier-poets. Indeed, it is Ernest Hemingway that a reader hears most often in much of O'Brien's work -- the spare, rhythmic repetition of key words and phrases; the hard, disciplined control of idea and emotion in sentences and paragraphs that are models of the stoic understatement; the darkly ironic gestures; and the classical imperatives of courage and cowardice, transgression and expiation, of Hemingway's best stories and novels.
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