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duty, as well as any feeling of guilt that adults might readily burden one with. This utterly unreliable narrator’s sometimes playful and sometimes grotesquely exaggerated actions speak for the common man who feels caught up in the whirlwinds of history, but at the same time questions his passivity and his innocence.
If Grass and his narrator experience times of war from a civilian’s perspective, O’Brien’s narrator finds himself smack in the middle of combat, of real life-and-death situations. Oscillating between feelings of guilt and illusions of innocence, O’Brien’s main character, Private First Class Paul Berlin, creates an alternate reality in which his guilt is supposed to be atoned for by desertion, and his sense of duty fulfilled by capturing a deserter named Cacciato. What Berlin ultimately finds out is that one cannot flee one’s obligations by escaping into dreams, and conversely, that dreams may constitute a reality consistent enough to replace the one that one wishes to leave behind. While sharing significant traits with his author, such as the experience of Vietnam, the guilt over participating in a war with whose purposes and methods he does not agree, or the need to prove himself in front of his father and his community, Paul Berlin is not Tim O’Brien. The novel, which critics have constantly dubbed as a war novel, much to its author’s dismay, makes intensive use of heteroglossia: a nameless third-person narrator goes in and out the main character’s mind, and sometimes it seems that Paul Berlin’s voice alternates with Tim O’Brien’s, the implied author’s. By creating Berlin, O’Brien attempts to work through his Vietnam trauma, while his main character consistently tries to dream his way out of it, or, in other words, to re-cover it. “He wasn’t dreaming, or imagining; just pretending,” the narrator tells us. Berlin’s dream starts at the critical moment in which he is supposed to start the squad’s ambush of Cacciato, the deserter whose courage everyone secretly admires, and whose recklessness everyone openly hates. The traumatic moment leaves a hole in Berlin’s memory (“What, in fact, had become of Cacciato?”) that he feels compelled to fill, so he rephrases the question more precisely, “what part was fact and what part was the extension of fact?” (O’Brien 27) If there is a