SOURCE: "Ballad Allusions in Tim O'Brien's 'Where Have You Gone, Charming Billy?'," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 28, No. 2, Spring, 1991, pp. 218-22.

In the essay below, Wilhelm observes a difference in use of allusions to the ballads "Billy Boy" and "Lord Randal" in O'Brien's short story and the version that appeared in Going after Cacciato as "Night Watch."

Before being joined and published as a novel, several chapters of Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato appeared as individual short stories. Frequently these stories were much shorter than the corresponding chapters in O'Brien's novel, and they usually bore different titles. For example, in the October 1977 issue of Esquire, O'Brien published a story entitled "Fisherman." Subsequently he expanded this piece to form two separate chapters in Going After Cacciato, and he renamed these chapters "Lake Country" and "World's Greatest Lake Country."

Critical commentary on Going After Cacciato is, of course...