COLONIAL MASCULINITY IN GOING AFTER CACCIATO BY TIM O'BRIEN

Tóm tắt

There have been several feminist research depicting Tim O’Brien’s fiction as discourses of masculinity, but none mention how the writer interprets the relationship between gender and race in these texts. This article sees one of O’Brien’s most important fictions, Going After Cacciato (1978), an anti-war novel, as his project to de-gender the American colonial masculinity perspectives on the war. The novel is set during the war in Vietnam. It is told from the point of view of an American soldier, Paul Berlin. Cacciato, one of Berlin's squadmates, goes absent without leave to walk from Vietnam to Paris. The novel describes Berlin's imagined chase of Cacciato across Eurasia. Berlin’s two worlds, real and unreal, match each other in the way he looks at Asian women in particular, and Asian world in general because they are both reflect the colonial masculine perspective.