earticle

영어

Kevin Power’s The Yellow Birds deals with the experiences of protagonist John Bartle during and after Iraq War, partly reflecting the author’s own war experiences. Apart from the many critics’ approaches based on conventional war narratives such as trauma, loss and/or restoration of memory, and survivor’s guilt, this paper focuses on the lack or absence of Bartle’s surroundings. Having no father and brother, awkward with human relations, and harassed for his withdrawn personality by his peers, Bartle has to undergo a series of hardships in his present life. Wanting to flee from his present reality, he chooses to join the army, which he hopes will provide what he is looking for suchas a change of personality and alternative family members, and thus help him grow up as an ordinary man. The new family-figures he meets in the army seems to fill the absence in his life, but they prove unfit and even fatal due to the common traits of forcing their own standards or values on others. Bartle also learns that the army is unable to give him what he wants because its emphasis on the violent/destructive nature of soldiers betrays his expectation. The unlawful dealing with Murph’s dead body results in Bartle’s imprisonment, yet it is his time in jail that gives him a lesson to maintain the will to live and be an ordinary man. His new life will be different with this newly acquired lesson his experiences.