Beyond Individual Trauma

As trauma and war are often inseparable pairs,trauma is an important part of war writing.The Iraq War narratives not only bear traditional features of trauma representation,but also witness some breakthrough and development.Kevin Powers’ debut novel The Yellow Birds is based on his personal experience of the Iraq War.Through veteran Bartle’s perspective,the novel poetically tells about the traumatic experience of the veteran from the perpetrator to the victim,with the juxtaposition of the war related experience both at home and on the battlefield.The present study,based on the recent research home and abroad on this novel,takes the individual trauma of characters as the starting point,with combined perspectives of both the trauma discourse and narrative criticism,and conducts a close reading of this Iraq War narrative.It focuses on the characters’ traumatic experience by interpreting the features of different parties,including the American veterans and their families,the Iraqi civilians and militants,the U.S.official and the domestic masses,as well as their influence on the narrator Bartle,all of which can be taken as being manipulated by the implied author.It further puts such traumatic experience in the complex political and cultural background of the Iraq War and thus reveals how veteran’s narrative deconstructs the official-media discourse and meanwhile helps to construct the Iraq War culture.By doing this,it aims at revealing the realistic concern behind the traumatic writing of the novel,and exploring the potential intervening forces of literary narrative discourse in the contemporary cultural and political realities.The thesis consists of three parts: introduction,the main body and conclusion: The introductory part briefly introduces the development of the Iraq War literature,the novel’s creation as well as the status quo of interpretations,the theoretical framework as well as the organization of this thesis.Chapter one reveals the extension of traumatic subjects by analyzing the significance of individuals’ characterization to their communities.It suggests that the traumatic experience of these three veterans from different backgrounds is the epitome of the trauma of the entire veterans’ community.Meanwhile,this trauma even extends to their families.The different responses of Bartle’s and Murph’s mothers to their sons’ war experience reflect the different attitudes and practices of the entire society toward the veterans.Chapter two explores how the descriptions of Iraqis complicate American veterans’ traumatization by focalizing on the “others” on the battlefield.In the novel,Iraqi civilians are marginalized through the double victimization by American troops and Iraqi militants,but they are unable to change the status quo of their condition.Their helplessness is the projection of the narrator Bartle’s own trauma,and in turn aggravates his traumatization.At the same time,the obfuscation of Iraqi militants in the novel has intensified the tension of American veterans and further deepened their traumatic experience.Chapter three examines the counternarrative to the justification of the war to excavate the underlying causes for veterans’ trauma.It demonstrates that their trauma is caused by the disillusionment of war fantasies,and is further aggravated by the misunderstandings of the masses.In the meantime,the one-percent war brought by the All-Volunteer Force(AVF)also accounts for veterans’ trauma.Because of the lack of affective connections with the masses,American veterans are increasingly caught in a forgotten situation,and the sense of alienation permeates through the whole process of their traumatic experience.The concluding part further summarizes the analysis in the main body of the thesis.It points out that the representation of trauma in the novel has extended far beyond individual trauma of the veteran.Instead,this novel,through exemplifying the productivity of narrative from a limited perspective,develops the profundity of trauma discourse.Furthermore,the present thesis admits the prominent position of U.S.veterans’ trauma in the novel,and believes that such partiality is inevitable in the early development of the Iraq War narrative.In spite of all this,The Yellow Birds is still a milestone in the evolution of Iraq War literature.