What was your favorite aspect of the book? And least favorite?
My favorite: I loved the notion of traveling overland from Vietnam to Paris and the descriptions of the places they saw: Mandalay, India, Tehran, Greece, etc. And I admired the depiction of the war-without-a-front as a psychological battle that occurred in each man's head. I also found the events leading up to Lt. Martin's murder eerie and awe-inspiring.
My least favorite: Maybe this is a comment on my own comprehension rather than the author's skill, but I found many of the characters hard to picture and hard to distinguish one from the other. Even Paul Berlin. I didn't feel I had a great grasp on who he actually was. (I did like the portraits of the two lieutenants: the strict, by the book Lt. Martin and the more realistic, more humane Lt. Corson, who fell in love in India and wanted to stay).
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I hate to be boring, but those were my favorite and least favorite also. I liked the journey and the things they saw in each new place. The adventures they encountered.
I found the characters kind of boring. Maybe it was because there were too many of them. Or because O'Brien wanted realistic characters rather than cliches. I agree the lieutenants did stand out, and I think did Cacciato, too. He was so goofy and annoying.
Oh, good call on Cacciato. I didn't really have a handle on him. He seemed like a big goofy innocent who was able, more so than the others, to roll with the punches (he at least seemed to have some defense mechanisms, like fishing, for blocking out the ugliness of the war), so it seemed a bit odd to me that he would be the one to run away. I don't know. Was there something symbolic about chasing/recapturing their own innocence?
I just read on Wikipedia that his name is Italian for "hunted/caught." (There's an interesting paragraph, too, about how the tunnels are an allusion to "Alice in Wonderland": In the chapter "A Hole On The Way To Paris," the characters escape the endless tunnels by "falling out" just as they fell in; this allusion to Alice In Wonderland helps to reveal the story as fiction.
Wasn't their agreement to kill the anal lieutenant absolutely riveting, though? The guy is just insisting on going by the book, but all the other guys understand that in certain contexts the book is meaningless. It's where they drew the line. I mean, some guys drew the line at going to the war in the first place. They refused to be drafted. Other guys went over and refused to fight, even wounding themselves to get out of combat duty. Some guys went AWOL. Everyone had their own line and their own place to draw it.
Yeah, the thing with Lt. Martin was really interesting. I've read a little bit before about the phenomenon of soldiers killing their own leader. I think it's called fragging. It's both hard and easy to imagine the impulse, if you thought said leader was risking your lives unnecessarily.
Why do you think they felt it had to be a unanimous decision, including Cacciato's input? Would Cacciato even have known what happened? He seemed so much in his own world. It seemed almost tribal and ceremonial the way they went about it.
And it's one of the truly awful, horrifying things about war: that people are being killed left and right, to th extent that it becomes thinkable and fairly easy to kill someone with impunity. It makes you wonder how often that happens. You don't like someone in your battalion either for a good reason or a bad reason — and poof! — they turn up dead the next day, the "victim" of a landmine or grenade explosion or bullet, no questions asked.
Have you seen "Apocalypse Now"?
No, I haven't seen it, but I've always wanted to.
I assumed they wanted it to be unanimous so that they would all be responsible for it and no one could claim later not to have been involved. But yeah, I also thought Cacciato was so out of it that he probably could've been left out of the loop with no trouble.
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