I Read for You:The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers

Murph’s mom gets Bartle to promise her that he would bring her son safe from the war in Iraq.??He does not.??Gruff, foulmouthed Sergeant Sterling knows all along that Murph is a dead man.??He punches Bartle in the face for the false promise he made to Murph’s mom.??His war experience informs him that such a promise must not be made.??

In Al Tafar, Nineveh Province, Murph is killed and his body is severely mutilated as he wanders off naked at night in the city. Bartle and Sterling eventually find his body with the help of some native cartwright.??Instead of hauling his body back to their camp, they sink it in the river.??Sterling kills the cartwright and later himself.??Bartle returns home—a total mess—to serve a five-year sentence in a prison on a military base.

In a brilliantly structured novel, Powers paints panoramic scenes of the war both on the ground and through the mind of the narrator—Bartle.??As Bartle narrates the macabre story of the war, he neither blames nor takes sides.??He aims to make the readers see the war for what it is and not necessarily make sense of it.??At the end of the day, people perceive reality differently.???????

Although the Powers’s readers know at an early point in the novel of what happens to Murph, their desire to read through the novel grows stronger.??Powers’s ability to paint live scenes is what captivates readers’ attention.??It transcends the banal scheme of creating suspense by causing the readers to hanker after knowing what is going to happen next!??In addition, Powers employs the flashback technique effectively. Not only he visits reality but he also re-views it.??Furthermore, his alternation between two different registers in the language brings both depth and reality to his work. To me, should the?Yellow Birds?be credited for singularity, its ability to throw its readers head over heels into a mental warzone would be the reason.