THE YELLOW BIRDS by Kevin Powers
Although this novel is set during the ongoing war in Iraq, Kevin Powers does not attempt to document U.S. military strategies or examine the political objectives behind this controversial campaign.
Instead, it is a study of the psychological impact of the horror of warfare on one soldier, John Bartle, and, in the author’s words, it aims “to create the cartography of one man’s consciousness”.
As a result, the tension derives from the trauma Bartle experiences rather than from the logistics of battle.
This narrative device enables us to see inside his tortured mind when asked the simple question : What happened over there? :
“What happened? What fucking happened? That’s not even the question, I thought. How is that the question? How do you answer the unanswerable? To say what happened, the mere facts, the disposition of events in time, would come to seem like a kind of treachery. The dominoes of moments, lined up symmetrically, then tumbling backward against the hazy and unsure push of cause, showed only that a fall is every object’s destiny. It is not enough to say what happened. Everything happened. Everything fell”. Continue reading
