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….
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