MAPPING THE LANDSCAPE OF MEMORY: TRAUMA AND SURVIVAL IN KEVIN POWERS' THE YELLOW BIRDS

Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds offers a poignant and introspective account of the psychological toll of war, grounded in the author’s own experiences as a machine gunner in the Iraq War. This paper examines the novel as a deeply layered exploration of trauma, memory, and survival, focusing on the inner lives of its central characters, Private John Bartle and Private Daniel Murphy. Employing the lens of trauma theory and survival psychology, the study analyzes how the novel captures the disintegration of the self when confronted with sustained violence and moral injury. By tracing the narrative across the three phases of survival psychology—pre-impact, impact, and post-impact—it reveals how each character represents the unpredictable and psychologically destabilizing terrain of war. While Murphy succumbs to the mental pressures of combat, Bartle survives physically but remains psychologically fragmented, haunted by guilt and suppressed memory. Powers’ use of fragmented chronology and poetic language mirrors the fractured consciousness of trauma survivors, emphasizing that survival extends beyond the battlefield and into the unhealed psyche. The novel resists traditional war heroism, instead it maps a narrative of vulnerability, silence, and emotional aftermath that redefines the boundaries of contemporary war literature.