In the essay below, Griffith explicates the meanings of both the characters' actions and the narrative's events in Going after Cacciato by situating them in their historical context.

In the following review, Wilson favorably comments on O'Brien's realistic descriptions of war from a footsoldier's perspective in Going after Cacciato.

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 wa...

Going After Cacciato borrows, for reasons not entirely clear to me, from the conventions of anti-war fiction as they are laid down in such books as A Farewell to Arms and Catch-22…. [Parts] of the narrative trade Hemingway's melodramatic understatement for the cartoonishness of Catch-22 which makes war nearly as exotic and interesting as it is horrifying and insane…. These bits of tone are the conventional signposts of O'Brien's novel. Fortunately its heart is to be found ...

As a fictional portrait of this war, "Going After Cacciato" is hard to fault, and will be hard to better…. (p. 130) [An] entirely different kind of game is being played here from the deadly-true account of Vietnam military action, and the picaresque interludes, which take up about half the novel, serve not only as relief from Vietnam but as a kind of excuse from it. At another juncture, with a fine colorful flair that does not omit comedy and shrewd political irony, O'Brien invol...

[Going After Cacciato] is a highly idealistic work and a surprisingly lyrical one, offering a grittily beautiful picture of a war none of the participants seem to support or understand, and a vision of peace, of transcendence, which turns American involvement in Vietnam into merely a hellish way station on the road to potential salvation. (p. 603) O'Brien's journey has more of the surrealism of Donald Barthelme's The Dead Father, another novel about a group search, than of the grim fact...

Going After Cacciato is, without reservation, one of the most challenging and powerful novels to find its way into print in some time. O'Brien's infantry experience in Vietnam seems to have determined the shape and content of his literary career thus far. He wrote an undistinguished first novel, Northern Lights, and an excellent work of nonfiction, If I Die in a Combat Zone. With this third book he has accomplished something of a miracle. By using all the authentic and bloody detail that he kn...

By turns lurid and lyrical, "Going After Cacciato" combines a surface of realistic war reportage … with a deeper level—perhaps possible only in fiction—of the surrealistic effect war has on the daydreams and nightmares of the combatants. To call "Going After Cacciato" a novel about war is like calling "Moby Dick" a novel about whales…. [As] the epigraph from Siegfried Sassoon says, "Soldiers are dreamers," and ever so gradua...