Reading Group Guide

The Yellow
The Yellow
TheBirds
Yellow
Birds
Birds
A Novel
A Novel
by
A Novel
kevin powers
kevin powers
kevin powers

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 Author’s note

The Yellow Birds began as an attempt to reckon with one

question: What was it like over there? Sometime in 2007 I
thought I might be able to find an answer to that question,
not only for the many people who had asked me, but also
for myself. As soon as the first words of the book were put
down on the page, I realized I was unequal to the task of an-
swering, that if there is any true thing in this world it is that
war is only like itself.
People, however, are all the same: grief and fear, shame
and anger, are as alike in each of us as is our breath or blood,
in spite of differences of scope or scale or the useless divi-
sions between their common or uncommon causes. I hoped
that I could begin again with this in mind, understanding
now that the difficulty of contending with this question was
not that it remained unanswered, but rather how I might
find a way to say that the answer could be known to each of
us if we’d only allow ourselves to be reminded of it.
Over the course of almost four years I tried to find a way
to do this. I started making something like progress that

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summer of 2007, writing late into the night in my rented

room in the Jackson Ward neighborhood of Richmond, Vir-
ginia. Sometimes I dedicated whole days of my tenuous
employment at a credit-card company to furtive work on
the novel. I wrote as much as I could whenever I could. I
spent the last of those four years stripping away anything
and everything that didn’t seem essential.
I finished The Yellow Birds in Austin, Texas, in late
September of 2011. What ended then was not just the writ-
ing of a book, though it was mostly that, but also something
else I had begun seven years before and seven thousand
miles away from the wooden porch where I went to have
a smoke when it was finished. Though I hope I’ve told one
small part of the truth about that war, what I’ve written is
not meant to report or document, nor is it meant to argue
or advocate. Instead, I tried with what little skill I have to
create the cartography of one man’s consciousness, to let it
stand, however briefly, as my reminder.

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 A conversation with Kevin
Powers and Jonathan Ruppin of
Foyles Bookshop, London

How did you come to join the army at the age of seventeen?

I wasn’t a particularly good student in high school, but I

knew that I wanted to go to college. And given the fact that
there is a long tradition of military service in my family,
enlisting always seemed like a viable option. It was neither
encouraged nor discouraged, but I had by then inferred that
the military was where a person went to develop the quali-
ties I had come to admire in my father, my uncle, and both of
my grandfathers. The cliché, in my case, was true: I thought
that the army would “make me a man.”

First World War poet Wilfred Owen wrote in the preface

to his poems: “My subject is War, and the pity of War. The
Poetry is in the pity.” Does this apply to The Yellow Birds?

I can only say that the impulse to write The Yellow Birds
came from a desire to look for some truth that I hoped could

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be found at the core of that most extreme of human ex-

periences. I also thought that by placing the emphasis on
the language, using it to demonstrate Bartle’s perpetual, un-
bearable sense of awe and wonder, I’d have at least a chance
of connecting to another human being on an emotional
level. I wanted to engage with the imagination above all else,
because I believe that empathy is an imaginative act.

What sort of reactions have you had from those with combat
experience in Iraq?

I don’t know if many vets have had a chance to read the book
yet, but I have had several kind messages of encouragement
and support, for which I am deeply grateful.

You’re also a poet and this comes across in the deeply lyrical
quality of your prose. Was this intended in counterpoint to
the rawness of the dialogue?

I intended it as counterpoint not just to the rawness of

the dialogue, but also to the rawness of the experience. In
that respect it is more point than counterpoint. In trying to
demonstrate Bartle’s mental state, I felt very strongly that
the language would have to be prominent. Language is, in its
essence, a set of noises and signs that represent what is hap-
pening inside our heads. If I have faith that those noises and
signs can be received and understood by another person,

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then I should also have faith that they can be made more
finely tuned.

You’ve said that you were asked most often on your own re-
turn what it was like in Iraq. Do you feel that fiction works
better than reportage in overcoming people’s squeamishness
and portraying the reality of combat?

I wouldn’t say that it works better, only that it works in a dif-

ferent way. The benefit is that it can confound expectations,
particularly in the case of these wars that have been going on
so long. It is perfectly understandable that people become in-
ured to the violence when it is presented to them in the same
way for ten years or more. Art will sometimes allow you to see
the same thing in a new way. But this is only possible because
artists don’t have the same kinds of responsibilities as jour-
nalists. The work that journalists do during wartime is utterly
essential and, to me, incomprehensibly difficult.

One particularly poignant moment comes when Bartle prom-

ises the mother of his future comrade-in-arms Murphy that
he’ll make sure her son makes it home safely, by which time in
the book we know he will not be able to do so. Is Bartle’s guilt
fueled more by Murphy’s death or his own survival?

I would not be able to separate the two. The root of his guilt
is that he wanted to be good, and he tried to be good, but he

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failed. His conflict is between his desire to redeem that fail-

ure and his acceptance of complete powerlessness.

The Yellow Birds has already brought comparison with

books as diverse as Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the
Western Front, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, and Tim O’Brien’s
The Things They Carried. Were there any particular books
that served as an inspiration to you?

Those books were all very meaningful to me. I would in-

clude Meditations in Green by Stephen Wright, as well as
the poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa.

Can you tell us anything about what you’re working on at the

moment?

I have a collection of poems I’m nearly finished with. And

I’ve begun work on my second novel, about a murder that
takes place in Virginia just after the Civil War.

Interview by Jonathan Ruppin of Foyles Bookshops (foyles.co.uk)

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 Questions and topics for
discussion

1. Discuss the title, The Yellow Birds, and the U.S. Army
marching cadence that inspired it. What does the ca-
dence mean to you? How does the cadence and the title
influence your reading of the book?

2. John Bartle and Daniel Murphy first meet when

Sergeant Sterling orders them to work as a team. From
that moment on, they spend every minute together.
How does their relationship evolve, and how is it shaped
by the war? In what ways do you read The Yellow Birds
as a novel about friendship?

3. The story unfolds in a nonlinear narrative, with scenes

alternating between Bartle’s time as a soldier at war and
Bartle’s time as a veteran. What effect do you think this
structure achieves? Is the story better told this way than
chronologically? Why or why not?

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4. When Bartle returns home, the first person he sees is his

mother. How has their relationship changed, and why?
What does Bartle’s experience reveal about the effect of
the war on veterans’ families?

5. Bartle believes that cowardice is what motivated him to

join the military; he also believes it’s what prevents him
from becoming a man. When in the novel is Bartle truly
a coward, and when is he truly brave? How do you think
his notions of cowardice evolve or change throughout
the book? And how are they intertwined with his feel-
ings of guilt?

6. “Nothing seemed more natural than someone getting

killed,” Bartle thinks early on in The Yellow Birds. What
do you make of his attitude toward death and how it
evolves through the course of the novel?

7. When thinking about the letter he writes to Murphy’s

mother, Bartle reflects, “If writing it was wrong, then I
was wrong. If writing it was not wrong, enough of what
I’d done had been wrong and I would accept whatever
punishment it carried.” Why do you think Bartle felt
compelled to write the letter? How did it affect Mur-
phy’s mother, and how did it affect Bartle? Was it the
right decision? Why or why not?

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8. In an interview, author Kevin Powers said, “If I tried to

summarize what I was exploring in the book it would
be this: what does it mean to try to be good and fail?”
Discuss this question with your group. Have you ever
experienced this personally? If so, how did you come to
terms with it?

9. In reviews, The Yellow Birds has been compared to the

works of great writers of war, such as Ernest Heming-
way, Erich Maria Remarque, Wilfred Owen, and Tim
O’Brien. In O’Brien’s novel The Things They Carried, he
writes, “A thing may happen and be a total lie; another
thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.” Dis-
cuss your perspective on the intersection of truth and
fiction. What truths do you find in The Yellow Birds?
How does your experience of reading fiction about war
differ from your experience of reading nonfiction ac-
counts, such as newspaper articles?

10. Discuss the ending of the book and your emotional re-
action to it. Do you read the ending as melancholy,
hopeful, or both? What do you imagine lies ahead for
Bartle?

10

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