Focusing on Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried, this paper discusses how Tim O"Brien"s postmodern fiction is reinscribed into what might be called the American expansionist imagination. Though apparently subverting traditional literary/cultural conventions, O"Brien"s stories not only recycle but also reaffirm the American culture of "empire for liberty," which has always dreamed what Richard Poirier calls "a world elsewhere."<BR> O"Brien"s novels have represented the Vietnam War experiences in a typically postmodernist mode. Blurring the traditional boundaries between fiction and fact, fantasy and history, imagination and memory, and past and present, his novels such as Going After Cacciato, The Things They Carried, and In the Lake of the Woods carve out a unique postmodern narrative space. From within this fictional space, O"Brien criticizes the American war mentality and problematizes American cultural mythologies.<BR> Contradicting his own literary practices, however, O"Brien subjects the "power of the imagination" to the logic of the American ideology of communalism, as we can see in the final pages of Cacciato where Paul Berlin the protagonist comes back even in his imagination to his "obligation" to the small-town American community. O"Brien"s pseudo-autobiographical novels exemplify what narrative strategies the American cultural imagination could adopt in order to reconcile itself with a new national crisis, the Vietnam War. O"Brien"s postmodern narrative strategies are recontained by communalism; or, we might say that American liberal communalism finds new avenues of expression in O"Brien"s postmodern narrative strategies. In this sense, O"Brien"s repeated representation of the disoriented march of the American soldiers can be read as a synecdoche for an apparently disoriented but still expanding American culture in the postmodern age.
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