57 pages • 1 hour read
Tim O'BrienGoing After Cacciato
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1978A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 31-33Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 31 Summary: "Night March"
The platoon marches silently in the dark, with Paul at the rear, moving towards the sea. Paul stops for a moment, and another soldier urges him on. He tries not to think of Billy Boy Watkins dying of fright, of a heart attack, on the battlefield. To avoid thinking, he counts his steps, pretending each step earns him a dollar, and sings in his head.
Paul is determined not to join his fellow soldiers: “The trick would be to keep himself separate” (211). They walk around a village that smells like perfume, and Paul remembers his mother’s perfume bottles, which she used to hide liquor until his father threw the bottles in the incinerator. Paul doesn’t know anyone’s name yet.
After 8,600 steps, the soldiers stop to rest. The soldier with the large round face shares his canteen with Paul and gives him a piece of gum. He whistles tunelessly until Paul asks if he has to. The other soldier talks about his favorite gum, Black Jack; again, Paul asks him to be quiet, scared that the boy is talking too loudly. He’s silent for a while but soon starts whistling again without meaning to. The soldier starts talking about how weird it is; that Doc said Billy Boy was scared to death, and Paul can’t stop laughing.
Paul thinks about Billy Boy, how he tripped the mine, which severed his foot. He panicked, trying to reattach the foot, still in its boot. Doc gave him morphine and tried to quiet him, telling him he had “a million-dollar wound” (216) that would end the war for him, but Billy kept crying and panicking until he had a heart attack.
Paul is still giggling, thinking about how he’ll tell his father one day that it wasn’t so bad. The other soldier presses on his chest and sits on top of him until he stops laughing. Then he helps Paul to his feet and gives him a stick of Black Jack gum. The solider, Cacciato, tells Paul that he’ll be ok because he has “’a terrific sense of humor’” (218).
Chapter 32 Summary: "The Observation Post"
Paul steps away from the starlight scope and looks at the steady night. It’s four-thirty. He puts the machine away and eats a can of pears. Billy Boy Watkins’ death is simply a fact, “the first fact” (220). Paul drops the empty can on the beach.
Chapter 33 Summary: "Outlawed on the Road to Paris"
On February 10th, they’re arrested and taken to jail. Paul sits in a cell alone for eight days before he is blindfolded and led out of his cell to have his neck shaved. He is then taken to another room where he is handcuffed to a pillar with the other men. Sarkin walks freely around the cell.
Captain Rhallon enters and tells them they are being held for espionage and desertion, among other crimes. The US embassy has never heard of them, and they’ve discovered that Doc’s made-up treaty does not exist. Captain Rhallon asks them to explain why they travel with so much weaponry; Doc tells him again about Cacciato. Captain Rhallon questions their lack of orders and authorization but says he will try to help them.
Paul wonders at how his imagination has gotten out of control. He remembers how he would imagine being a professional baseball player as a kid, planning how he would achieve his dream. Then, later, he had to decide whether to go to college or into his father’s construction business. He compromised with junior college and then thought about getting a B.A. in education but decided to drop out instead, even though it would mean going to war. He didn’t really think about the consequences; instead of a decision, it was “an inability to decide” (227).
They spend days in a more comfortable cell before Captain Rhallon comes in one morning to tell them they’ve been found guilty and will be executed the next day. Then another officer in the Savak, the internal army, enters and orders Oscar to take off his sunglasses and throw them down. The officer crushes the glasses and elbows Oscar in the nose. He goes around the room, hitting the men in turn, and demanding that they confess that they ran away, that the mission is made-up, and that it’s impossible to march to Paris. The men confess, parroting the officer’s words back to him. The officer says to tell him they are clowns, and they shout, “Clowns!” (231).
Chapters 31-33 Analysis
Finally we have reached the beginning, the story that Paul is so afraid to face, which he calls the “ultimate war story”: the death of Billy Boy on his first day at war. What makes this death so horrific is that Billy doesn’t die from his actual wound—in fact, the wound would have saved him by allowing him to be discharged and sent home—but rather from the psychological trauma the wound causes, a heartbreaking irony. Paul is clearly in shock; he can’t stop laughing about it as they march that night. However, he thinks back on it coolly in Chapter 32, on the observation post; Billy’s death is simply a fact, devoid of emotional significance. It’s not clear whether Paul has become desensitized or is merely trying to play it cool.
On that first day, though, Cacciato is the person who comforts him; this is one of the most sustained interactions with Cacciato that the reader gets to witness. He’s annoyingly childlike, unable to stop whistling, but he’s also very kind. It’s notable that the soldiers in Chapter 31 take 8,600 steps—the same number of miles that Cacciato is said to be walking to Paris. This sheds some doubt on the veracity of the realistic chapters, but whether Cacciato didn’t actually desert or whether that event is coloring Paul’s retelling of the war stories is impossible to know.
Chapter 33 contains the most dangerous moment on the trip to Paris. Paul no longer has control over his imagination as they’re informed of their pending execution. Despite his constant fantasizing, we learn that one of the reasons he’s at war is due to a lack of imagination—or at least, a lack of foresight—which might explain his current obsession with figuring out the possibilities available to him. Paul’s guilt is once again apparent, manifested in the figure of the captain who circles the men, shaming them and even physically assaulting them. All of these scenes of judgment could be viewed as Paul’s attempts to come to terms with the consequences of desertion from the army.
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