War, Memory, and Identity in Kevin Powers's The Yellow Birds: A Study of Trauma and Symbolism

Abstract: This paper analyzes The Yellow Birds (2012) by Kevin Powers as a paradigmatic novel of an iraq war, which negotiates the relationship between war, memory and identity in terms of trauma and symbolism. It is based on a qualitative interpretive approach which uses close reading and thematic analysis that is based on trauma theory, memory studies and symbolic analysis. The findings are fourfold. To begin with, the novel portrays war as a pointless thing and does not represent it as heroic, which corresponds to post-heroic theories of defining the modern conflicts as disillusioning and meaningless. Second, memory appears as discontinuous, obtrusive and theatricizing the imperative of trauma to repeat and act as counter-memory to the official discourses of patriotic duty. Third, there is identity fracture, which is a symptom of moral injury and dissonance between social concepts of heroism and real life. Fourth, symbolism is made the main vehicle of the trauma because repetitive images, yellow birds, rivers, and letters turn psychic traumas into aesthetic expression. These findings are placed in the context of the existing scholarship and form an integrative contribution of the given study: whereas before, the research treated trauma, memory, or symbolism as distinct concepts, this study proves that they depend on each other. But finally, The Yellow Birds is a personal testament and a cultural memory bank, a record of anti-histories of the Iraq War and the embodiment of the purpose of literature in making us speakable what the trauma makes.