830 O’Brien, Tim
the preacher who plays “the game” better than she;
Eugene, who deserts Ciel after the death of their
child; and Cora’s shadowy lovers “who came in the
night and showed her the thing that felt good in the
dark” and did not leave “fractured jaws or bruised
eyes.” Naylor emphasizes the male absence to high-
light the feminine presence.
During Lorraine’s rape, the male presence is
felt most viscerally—and ironically in the child-
ish, brutal, pure physicality of C. C. Baker and the
boys, the gang, the pubescent patriarchy—where she
found herself: “on her knees, surrounded by the most
dangerous species in existence—human males with
an erection to validate in a world that was only six
feet wide.” This graphic violence appears to stand
in direct contrast to the shadowy appearances and
disappearances of men throughout the novel; how-
ever, the rape sets off a neighborhood-wide series of
nightmares that haunt the women of Brewster Place
until the day of the block party. As much as dreams
are a symbol for hope and possibility in The Women
of Brewster Place, the apparitions of men counterbal-
ance those hopeful dreams.
After being raped, Lorraine kills Ben and, to
some extent, the story of the men of Brewster Place
ends. Regardless of his empathetic connection to
Lorraine, Ben, like the gang, is a symbol of the
patriarchy—men who adhere to the larger system of
power and privilege beyond the walls of race.
Even with the violence of the gang, whose rage
stems from the threat lesbianism represents to their
maleness, Naylor makes the case that matriarchy
is not the cause of the diminishing status of the
African-American community but the residual—
and perhaps foundational—strength of it. Naylor
displaces the sociological view that the absence of
males is the cause of economic and cultural pov-
erty with the belief that the presence of women is
the core of hope. And while critics have disagreed
about Naylor’s presentation (or lack thereof ) of the
black male in The Women of Brewster Place, one can
also understand the black male’s position not as a
purely negative one, but as one of a mere shadow
of the patriarchal power structure that reveals the
ineffectual double function of the wall of Brewster
Place as a barrier to intrusion and to escape. There
the men “reigned in that unlit alley like dwarfed
warrior-kings. . . . [And] they only had that three-
hundred-foot alley to serve them as stateroom,
armored tank and executioner’s chamber,” while the
women of Brewster Place strive to craft the same
space as a home.
Christopher Hudsono’briEN, Tim Going after Cacciato
(1978)
Going after Cacciato, which won the National Book
Award in 1979, is a critically acclaimed novel that
chronicles the experiences of a group of soldiers
in the Vietnam War. Written by Tim O’Brien (b.
1946), who experienced the war’s multifaceted real-
ity firsthand, the novel describes the life of a soldier
in realistic detail. At the same time, it is a dream-
like fantasy about the hopes of a young man at war.
The book tells the story of Cacciato, who leaves his
post and embarks on a journey across continents to
the freedom of Paris. In its weaving of reality and
fantasy, the novel proves the point of its chosen epi-
graph: “Soldiers are dreamers.”
Going after Cacciato is, at its most basic level, a
war story that explores the brutal, and sometimes
banal, realities of war, from the fear and death to
boredom and incessant marching. But it is the very
word reality that calls attention to more interesting
aspects of this novel. The story of the chase after
Cacciato takes place mainly, if not completely, in
the imagination of another soldier, Paul Berlin. In
this way, Going after Cacciato is a story about the act
of storytelling itself. While the narrative alternates
between the mundane and the romantic, the story
is more than a dream. As Berlin says about his own
act of imagining, “it wasn’t even pretending . . . it
was a working out of the possibilities.” And the
possibilities worked out in Going after Cacciato are
the possibilities in a time of war for basic survival,
for expiation of guilt, and, in the end, for a kind of
heroism.
Brian ChanenGuILt in Going after Cacciato
The narrative of Going after Cacciato alternates
between what are essentially two separate narrative
paths that are situated in related, yet quite distinct,