Trauma of Iraq war in Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds

Abstract EN

This paper examines the traumatic impact of the Iraq war on the US-soldiers who are the central force in American war-fiction written after 2003.

I intend to discuss Kevin Powers' The Yellow Birds' (2013) where the distracted and traumatized US soldiers suffer from a wound of the mind, which turns them into individuals who are not whole or normal.

This psychological wound is responsible for their detachment and paralysis.

Powers view the soldiers as victims suffering from flashbacks, and retreating into isolation, whose actions later are translated into a stigma of mental illness.

The Yellow Birds novel is written by the American writer Kevin Powers, who is an Iraq War veteran.

He served in the US Army in 2004 and 2005 in Iraq, where he was deployed as a machine gunner in Mosul and Tal Afar.

In this novel, he presented his memories and terrible experiment during his service.

The novel has been acclaimed together of the simplest contemporary novels on war, not just for its literary value but also for its boldness to reveal America's role in spreading destruction within the world since its inception.

One of the novel's striking features is that the American soldier isn't depicted as a hero who came to save lots of Iraqi people from a tyrant and to bring democracy on a dish of gold, but as a person's being divided between death and survival.

This research aims to study the role of trauma in the representation of war.

And explain the US soldiers' humanity and sympathy as the "psychological pressure that will lead them to return to their country.