Mapping Memory: Moving Between Trauma and Terror in The Yellow Birds

Abstract

ABSTRACTKevin Powers’s elegiac novel The Yellow Birds (2012) formally maps the bereavement of a modern American soldier serving in the Iraq War. Powers’s novel charts the psychological cartography of Private John Bartle, illustrating a journey that renders both the mental and physical effects of war trauma. Through Bartle’s nonlinear narratology, Powers critiques the experience of bereavement while also adumbrating the difficulty of representing that experience. This article investigates the ways in which the expressions of bereavement in the novel expose the very terrors and traumas that define post-9/11 America. Bartle’s narrative illustrates a soldier who becomes a victim not only to the violence of a seemingly endless war but also to the social and political deceit that defines the United States’ contemporary war politics. Therefore, The Yellow Birds conveys a dislocated narration that stresses both a soldier’s individual mourning and the national mourning that characterizes the United States’ role in the Global War on Terror.