the yellow bird

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Recommended: Personal effects of war on soldiers

War Destroys the Soldier’s Mental State
Kevin Power’s The Yellow Bird, is a novel that revolves around the main character Bartle, a soldier during the war in Iraq who makes a promise to Murph’s mom that he will bring back her son home safely. Throughout the novel, Bartle and Murph is under sergeant Sterling control. By following Sterling’s orders, these men are forced to become desensitized to killing. In other words, to survive in Al Tafar, they learn how to become killing machines, or emotionless monsters. The brutality of the war has left them physically and mentally fatigued from the mental stress with them feeling constant danger, which clearly describes Posttraumatic stress (PTSD). PTSD is a disorder that may develop after a person is exposed to traumatic events. The symptoms of PTSD are described as disturbing reoccurring flashbacks, avoidance or numbing of memories, and hyper arousal. The Yellow Bird’s use of characterics of the soldiers, method of narrating, and imagery work together to show that the cruelty of the war leaves a disastrous effect on the soldiers.
The characteristics of the soldiers reveals that they have have developed PTSD, a psychiatric disorder that impairs soldier’s mental state. In march 2005 Bartle left Iraq to get back home to his Mother. He walks around the streets of Germany, and as he reaches a traffic circle he decides to take a cab to K-Town. As he is sitting in the cab, he looks out onto the trees that edge the road. “[his] muscles tensed…[his] fingers closed around a riffle that was not there…[he] continued to sweat and [his] heart was beating much faster”(54). This passage clearly describes the symptoms of PTSD called the flashback. The trees that edge the road have triggered Bartle’s upse...

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...and mutilated.
The war has left the soldier’s scarred with psychological troubles that they all successfully kill themselves except for Bartle. However, as time goes on, Bartle will learn how to forget his past. In the beginning of the novel, Power opens up the book by an epigraph by Sir Thomas Browne. To summarize, the epigraph is giving the readers insight of what happens to Bartle by the end of the story. In fact, Sir Thomas Brown is trying to convey the message that we all have the power to forget. It is in our nature to forget our evil pasts, but it takes time. In fact, it took Bartle a lot of time to heal from the war. He had to bring back the beauty of nature into his life, the nature he was taught how to destroy and forget during the war. As he is living in the cabin with nature, he is surrounded by innocence and beauty, which allows him to forget the past.

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