How Does Kevin Powers Present The War In The Yellow Birds

Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds depicts the war in Iraq through the eyes of the novel’s 21-year-old narrator, Private John Bartle. The novel focuses heavily on Bartle’s relationship with his best friend, 18-year-old Private Daniel “Murph” Murphy, who, sadly, is brutally killed in Iraq. The novel does not follow a chronological order but instead highlights the events of the war (before, during, and after the war) nonchronologically. The traumatic events that Bartle witnesses or experiences happen during the war; however, it is not until Bartle arrives home that he experiences the full force of the consequences of the traumas and develops posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and post-war hallucinations; he also struggles to adapt to civilian

Although Powers did not necessarily experience the same traumatic events that Bartle experiences, such as losing his best friend, Bartle, as a narrator, can perhaps be described as Powers’ surrogate. A surrogate is one who is “put into the place of another as a successor, substitute, or deputy” (Dictionary.com). Powers wanted the novel to be meaningful to his readers, so he projected his own thoughts and experiences in/regarding the war onto his narrator in order for the novel to be as real and honest and possible. In an interview with Tom Gjelten of NPR, Powers

Hosseini did not experience the same events or traumas that Saboor’s family does, and he does not seem to include scenes specifically for shock value or to elicit specific emotions from the readers; rather, his narratives use campfire-like stories (e.g. the story of the Div), descriptive imagery, and metaphors to draw his readers in and connect with them. And the Mountains Echoed and The Yellow Birds both depict a strong bond/relationship between two individuals, and both novels depict the loss of one of the two individuals, whether it be the loss of life or the loss of memory. Both Bartle and Saboor foreshadow the loss of a character, but one does so with a campfire- /fairytale-like story. Bartle suffers from PTSD, which affects the circumstances around him, but what affects the circumstances around Saboor is poverty, which is his reason for selling Pari to a wealthy couple. Both Bartle and Saboor experience guilt, the former as a result of his best friend’s death, and the latter as a result of resorting to selling his daughter in order to (fiscally) protect his family during the harsh winter. Bartle depicts the truths of war, and Saboor depicts the truths of poverty. Both novels are truly