Going after cacciato characters

Tim O'Brien is an American novelist well known for writing about the Vietnam War and the impact it had on the American soldiers who fought there. He won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction in 1979 for the Vietnam novel Going After Cacciato . However, his best known work of fiction is the critically acclaimed The Things They Carried , a collection of semi-autobiographical, inter-related short-stories inspired by O'Brien's wartime experiences in Vietnam.

O'Brien has held the endowed chair at the MFA program of Texas State University-San Marcos several times, from 2003 to 2004, then from 2005 to 2006, and a third time from 2008 to 2009. Upon completing his tour of duty, O'Brien went on to graduate school at Harvard University and received aninternship at the Washington Post . His writing career was launched in 1973 with the release of If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home , about his war experiences. In this memoir, O'Brien writes: "Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories."

One attribute in O'Brien's work is the blur between fiction and reality; labeled "Verisimilitude," 真实性, 逼真性his work contains actual details of the situations he experienced. Although this is a common literary technique, his conscious, explicit, and metafictional approach to the distinction between fact and fiction is a unique component of his writing style. In the chapter "Good Form" in The Things They Carried , O'Brien casts a distinction between "story-truth" (the truth of fiction) and "happening-truth" (the truth of fact or occurrence), writing that "story-truth is sometimes truer than happening-truth." Story truth is emotional truth; thus the feeling created by a fictional story is sometimes truer than what results from reading the facts. Certain sets of stories in The Things They Carried seem to contradict each other, and certain stories are designed to "undo" the suspension of disbelief created in previous stories; for example, "Speaking of Courage" is followed by "Notes", which explains in what ways "Speaking of Courage" is fictional.