Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais

Faculdade de Letras

Luisa Bechara de Lamounier Barbosa

METAFICTION IN KEVIN POWERS’S THE YELLOW BIRDS

Belo Horizonte
2015
 LUISA BECHARA DE LAMOUNIER BARBOSA

METAFICTION IN KEVIN POWERS’S THE YELLOW BIRDS

Monografia apresentada ao Curso de Letras da

Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, como
requisito parcial para obtenção do título de Bacharel
em Estudos Literários.
Orientador: Prof. Dr. Tom Burns

Belo Horizonte
2015
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank all the people who helped me throughout the development of this

monograph paper. I want to thank my family and friends for their support. I want to thank my

advisor, Professor Tom, for his guidance, time, and patience during this research. I also want

to thank all the members of the Núcleo de Estudo de Guerra (NEGUE) - FALE for the

opportunity to participate in many engaging discussions, lectures, and academic events

regarding war fiction, which has been essential to my undergraduate experience and

understanding of the genre. A special thanks to my dissertation committee members that

dedicated their time to read and reflect about what can be improved in the paper.
 ABSTRACT

This monograph aims to discuss metafiction in The Yellow Birds, a fictional novel by

Kevin Powers about the Iraq war published in 2012. The novel follows the non-chronological

account of Private John Bartle on his first deployment to the province of Al Tafar, his training

at Fort Dix, New Jersey, before the war, and his return to his hometown Richmond, Virginia,

as a war veteran. In order to discuss metafiction in this war novel, this monograph will discuss

first the role of trauma in the representation of war, subsequently examining Bartle’s own

trauma, using as support the works of Cathy Caruth, Nigel Hunt, Kate McLoughlin, and

Lyndsey Stonebridge. The discussion of metafiction will primarily rely on Patricia Waugh’s

Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction and will aim to define The

Yellow Birds as a ‘self-begetting novel’, additionally focusing on Tim O’Brien’s theory of ‘true’

war story in The Things They Carried in relation to The Yellow Birds.

Key-words: The Yellow Birds. Metafiction. War. Iraq. Trauma. Kevin Powers. Narrative. Tim

O’Brien. The Things They Carried. Self-Begetting. Fiction.

 RESUMO

Esta monografia tem como objetivo discutir metaficção em The Yellow Birds, um

romance de ficção escrito por Kevin Powers sobre a guerra no Iraque publicado em 2012. O

romance segue a narrativa de John Bartle, um soldado do exército americano no seu primeiro

destacamento para a província de Al Tafar; seu treinamento em Fort Dix, New Jersey, antes da

guerra, e o seu retorno à sua cidade natal Richmond, Virginia, como um veterano de guerra. A

fim de discutir metaficção nesse romance de guerra, esta monografia discutirá primeiramente o

papel do trauma na representação de guerra, em sequência examinando o trauma de Bartle,

usando como apoio as obras de Cathy Caruth, Nigel Hunt, Kate McLoughlin, e Lyndsey

Stonebridge. Tal discussão de metaficção se baseará primariamente na obra Metafiction: The

Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction de Patricia Waugh e tem como objetivo definir

The Yellow Birds como um romance ‘self-begetting’, adicionalmente focando na teoria de Tim

O’Brien sobre histórias de guerras verdadeiras, proposta em The Things They Carried, em

relação à The Yellow Birds.

Palavras-chaves: The Yellow Birds. Metaficção. Guerra. Iraque. Kevin Powers. Narrativa. Tim

O’Brien. The Things They Carried. Self-Begetting. Ficção.

 TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………………….1

2. TRAUMA AND REPRESENTATION OF WAR....………………………………………...5

3. METAFICTION IN THE WAR NARRATIVE....................................................................22

3.1 METAFICTION IN THE YELLOW BIRDS......................................................................................31

4. CONCLUSION……………………………………………………………………………....39

WORKS CITED......……………………………………………………………....……............43
 1. INTRODUCTION

Nearly all war narratives of the 20th century have contemplated about and attempted to

address the unspeakable burden that is organizing the chaos and brutality of modern warfare.

The idea that war traumatizes human beings did not emerge with the modern wars; from the

Iliad to 19th century conflicts, there are “horrendous scenes, samples of the destructive power

of war” (Vieira 4). Still, these wars were “circumscribed by the battlefield… the overwhelming

majority of the victims were soldiers” (Vieira 5). There were still ideals of bravery and honour

in war, however brutal and traumatising these conflicts were. In the 20th century, however, with

“the advent of so-called total war and the end of the so-called front, anyone could be affected

by the horrors of war.” (Vieira 5). Technology provided efficient methods of mass murder.

Civilians were not safe; cities were occupied and destroyed. The horrifying scale of technology

and barbarism combined resulted in a “moral, psychological and existential paralysis of

thought” (Stonebridge 194) often associated with post-WWI narratives. McLoughlin proposes

that “war defeats language” (17) - at the same time it demands representation, it paralysis speech

and struggles to be understood. This unique quality to war narratives has caused authors to use

metafiction in order to question not only the purpose of writing about war, but also discuss the

difficult process of writing itself. One of the most well-known metafictional war novels is Tim

O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (1990). O’Brien establishes a theory of “true” war fiction,

in which he defines the essential features of “true” war narratives. Most importantly, he

comments on the difficult process that is translating the war experience into narrative and

formulates the “memory-traffic” metaphor that will be analysed in chapter II of this monograph.

His task is essentially metafictional: O’Brien draws attention to the structure of the narrative

and the process of writing in order to “clarify the experience - including the difficulty of

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communicating it, to his readers as well as himself” (Silbergleid 150). The problem of

representing war is related to the paralyzing quality of trauma. The metafictional author who

discusses the difficulty of such representation must inevitably discuss the relationship between

trauma and narrative. The aim of this monograph, then, is to discuss metafiction in Kevin

Powers’s novel The Yellow Birds (2012), in relation to O’Brien’s theory of true war fiction,

taking into account the traumatic experience of the narrator.

The Yellow Birds depicts the Iraq war through the eyes of 21-year-old narrator Private

John Bartle, focusing on the relationship with his best friend Private Daniel Murphy, known

simply as “Murph”, both volunteers on their first tour in Iraq. The narrative explores their

relationship with Sergeant Sterling, a tough veteran with three tours in Iraq and the epitome of

the All-American soldier. Instead of following a chronological timeline - pre-war, during-war,

and post-war - the narrative highlights relevant events in all of these periods, but in a non-

chronological order. As with most war novels, the central traumatic events of the narrative

happen during the war, yet the consequences of this traumatic experience are felt upon returning

home.

In The Yellow Birds, the central traumatic event is Murph’s brutal death, Bartle’s only

friend. Extremely traumatized by his friend’s death, Bartle experiences extreme guilt,

depression and isolation upon returning to civilian life. There is a gap of five months between

the incident and Bartle’s return to the United States, coincidentally also the time in which he

begins to experience PTSD symptoms. Bartle is only able to grieve once he is home; in war,

vulnerability can prove to be fatal. It is Sergeant Sterling’s belief that “if you get back to the

States in your head before your ass is there too, then you are a fucking dead man” (156). This

gap can be explained as a sort of “latency” much explored in theories of trauma: the idea is that

“trauma divides the mind not only from itself, but also splits it in time: there’s a lag, a snatch,

in the experience of the traumatized that pulls them out of linear chronology” (Stonebridge
2
196). Sterling’s explanation is that Bartle has a sort of “edge” that protects him from breaking

down and allows him to endure the extreme stress of battle. This edge seems to be responsible

for the lag in his reaction to the trauma suffered in combat; although he was able to function in

war, he experiences extreme alienation upon coming home. The inadequacy of soldiers coming

home from the war zone is a recurring theme in war narratives. Silbergleid writes that in

returning home, there is the need to communicate the trauma suffered in combat, but also the

inability to do so, and that the act of writing war fiction seems to emerge from this dichotomy,

often as a therapeutic tool aiding the narrator in the overcoming of his trauma. (150).

In The Yellow Birds, there are two particular elements that tackle the issue of narrative.

The first is Bartle’s impersonation of Murph in a letter to his mother; in the letter, he

fictionalizes and takes on the role of author. Murph’s mother, realizing the fictional aspect of

the letter and knowing that it was not her son who had written it, embarks on a campaign to

discover what happened to her son and who had written that letter. The letter is traced back to

Bartle and he is imprisoned. The second instance of narrativity in the novel is when Bartle is in

prison at Fort Knox. He develops a system to deal with the overwhelming memories of war:

whenever he remembers something, he makes a mark on the wall with chalk. For each mark,

he can recall a specific moment and assign significance. This monograph proposes that these

marks constitute a form of narration that is cathartic to Bartle, and that his discussion of the

chronology of war is a task of metafiction. This monograph further proposes that the metafiction

in the The Yellow Birds emerges from Bartle’s evolving awareness of the issues regarding

representation of war.

ii

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 This paper will be divided into an introduction, two chapters, and a conclusion. In

chapter I (Trauma and Representation of War) this monograph will examine trauma in relation

to the representation of war fiction. This chapter will discuss the difficulty in communicating

the trauma suffered in combat and how literature can be therapeutic in overcoming trauma,

using as support the works of Cathy Caruth, Lynsey Stonebridge, Nigel Hunt, and Kate

McLoughlin. The chapter will identify in The Yellow Birds some themes that recur in war

narratives, such as death, brutality, bravery, manhood, fear, and readjustment to civilian life.

This chapter will attempt to identify what causes trauma in war, specifically analysing Murph’s

death as a traumatic event for Bartle and comment on his PTSD and readjustment to civilian

life. It will further argue that Bartle’s healing process is intimately related to the act of writing

and, ultimately, metafiction. Chapter II (Metafiction in the War Narrative) will examine

metafiction in The Yellow Birds, focusing on the two instances in which the narrator takes on

the role of author and discusses narrativity and representation. It will propose that the novel is

a self-begetting metafictional novel, in which the focus is on the narrator’s consciousness of the

narrative. Furthermore, it will explore the relationship between the narrator’s evolving

consciousness in the self-begetting novel and the cathartic quality of writing war fiction. The

chapter will discuss the definition of metafiction based on the works of Tim O’Brien and

Patricia Waugh and will draw some comparisons between the novel and O’Brien’s theory of

“true” war story.

2. TRAUMA AND REPRESENTATION OF WAR

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 In her article “War and Words”, Kate McLoughlin argues that war literature exposes the

feeling of inadequacy that inevitably surrounds the author of texts of war. According to

McLoughlin, the war experience demands narration, but at the same it is an overwhelming force

that often silences and paralyzes the author. To her, this silence is “a well-documented response

to trauma and particularly associated with grief” (17). The individual, in this state of paralysis,

often turns to literature as a way to obtain peace. McLoughlin states that “more realistic is the

thought that writing about war somehow controls it: imposing at least verbal order on the chaos

makes it seem more comprehensible and therefore feel safer” (War and Words 19).

Although the act of writing is often personal, arising from a need to cope with the trauma

of war, it is often done to “keep the record for others - those who were there and can no longer

speak for themselves, and those who were not there and need to be told” (McLoughlin 19). This

is seen in The Yellow Birds in the two instances of narrative mentioned in the introduction of

this monograph. The narrator and author, Bartle, puts his dead friend, Murph, in the centre of

his preoccupation with narrative: “I felt an obligation to remember him [Murph] correctly,

because all remembrances are assignations of significance, and no one else would ever know

what happened to him, perhaps not even me.” (60). Bartle’s obligation to remember Murph

correctly might stem from what McLoughlin calls the “ethical-aesthetic burden”, in which there

is a demand that those who are capable of writing must write in order to give meaning to death.

McLoughlin writes that another reason for writing about war is its cathartic quality: the

traumatized soldier is able to achieve psychological recovery through what Shay calls the

“construction of a personal narrative of events that receives sympathetic hearing” (qtd. in

McLoughlin Authoring War 20). Bartle experiences symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder

when he returns home - ranging from paralysis, depression, and isolation – yet in prison he is

finally able to construct a narrative detailing his experience of war. Whilst serving his prison

sentence, he slowly comes to terms with the horrific events witnessed and committed in war,
5
and is gradually able to overcome his feelings of paralysis and depression. Bartle experiences

catharsis and is able to begin his healing process by acknowledging his traumatic experience

and taking responsibility for his wrongdoings.

In order to discuss Bartle’s catharsis, this monograph must first discuss his trauma and

the relationship with his best friend, Daniel Murphy. One important aspect to be contemplated

at this point is the fact that there are two narrators, two Bartles: one who is an older narrator

looking back to his younger self and recounting his experience; and another who is the 21-year-

old living that experience. The younger narrator is present mostly when the narrative takes place

at Al Tafar up to the moment Bartle is arrested in his hometown, whereas the older-narrator is

the dominant voice in the narrative and is present throughout the novel. The importance of

noticing the presence of this older-narrator is to identify the several instances of foreshadowing

in the novel – mainly the narrator seeking to pinpoint the exact moment in which Murph was

doomed to die:

I try so hard now to remember if I saw any hint of what was coming, if there was

some shadow over him, some way I could have known he was so close to being

killed. In my memory of those days on the rooftop, he is half a ghost. But I didn’t

see it then, and couldn’t. No one can see that. (24-25)

Not only is Bartle haunted by Murph’s death, he is plagued by his promise to Murph’s

mother: that he would take care of Murph and take him home to his mother. The narrative is

filled with hints regarding Murph’s fate and attempts of justifying the letter Bartle wrote to

Murph’s mother and Bartle’s broken promise.

At one point, Bartle contemplates the picture of Murph and his high-school sweetheart.

He sees something in that picture, a hint of recognition and foreshadowing. He sees Murph’s

expression as that of “someone who knew, but he could not have” (81). In other instances, he

6
describes Murph’s eyes as if “they had fallen farther into his sockets during the past few

months… there were times when I looked at him and could only see two small shadows, two

empty holes” (7). Further in the narrative, the narrator compares Murph and Sergeant Sterling.

Whereas Sterling was a symbol of the perfect soldier - strong, masculine, confident, a person

who “excelled in death and brutality and domination” (19) - Murph was the ordinary version.

Bartle mentions that “maybe all I noticed was a condition of reality, applicable everywhere on

earth: some people are extraordinary and some are not” (35). These are instances that hint to

the existence of an older narrator who is looking into the past to try to determine Murph’s

breaking point.

Murph’s condition as “ordinary” is extremely relevant to the narrative. It is expressed

throughout the narrative that Murph could not cope with the stress and brutality of war.

Although the reader learns early in the narrative that Murph is dead, it is only in the end that

the readers discover the details surrounding his death. Leading up to that moment is the idea

that Murph was “broken” long before his death. He was “ordinary” because he could not view

death as ordinary. His sensitive nature did not allow him to process stress and pain in the same

detached manner as Sterling. In war, to keep your mind intact is indeed extraordinary. In one

episode, a fellow soldier is killed and Murph is visibly disturbed, lingering near the dead body

and touching him. This reaction appears strange to other soldiers because compassion is so rare

in war. Soldiers manage to live by becoming desensitized. The moment that Murph allows his

emotions to take hold seems to be the moment that things start going downhill:

I turned and saw Murph kneeling next to his body. His hands were on his thighs.

I could have gone to Murph, but I did not. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to be

responsible for him. I had enough to worry about. I was disintegrating too. How

was I supposed to keep us both intact? It is possible that I broke my promise in

7
 that very moment, that if I’d gone to comfort him a second earlier, he might not

have broken himself. (120)

The narrator attempts to pinpoint the moment when there was a change in Murph, but

eventually concludes that “these are subtle shifts, and trying to distinguish them is like trying

to measure the degrees of gray when evening comes” (155). Murph begins to act aloof and

strange, avoiding other soldiers and keeping to himself, up to the point that Bartle decides to go

to Sterling with his concerns, to which Sterling replies that “some people just can’t fucking

hack it, Private. You’d better get used to the fact that Murph’s a dead man” (155). Bartle is

taken aback by this comment, and Sterling continues:

Private, you forget the edge you’ve got, because the edge is normal now… If

you get back to the States in your head before your ass is there too, then you are

a fucking dead man, I’m telling you. You don’t know where Murph keeps going,

but I do… Murph is home, Bartle. And he’s gonna be there with a flag shoved

up his ass before you know it.... There is only one way home for real, Private.

You’ve got to stay deviant in this motherfucker. (156)

Murph’s behaviour is attributed to his mental instability: he lacks the “edge” to cope with

the brutality of war. He is traumatised like other soldiers, but unlike them, he begins to suffer

from stress whilst in war, which proves to be fatal to him. Bartle starts to tail him because he

“didn’t want to believe [he] was watching the actions of someone who was already dead” (159).

He finally discovers that Murph has been watching a medic girl working at the medic station,

not merely due to infatuation or due to her beauty, but because “that place, those little tents at

the top of the hill, the small area where she was, it might have been the last habitat for gentleness

and kindness that we’d ever know” (164).

8
 Sometime later, when the base is hit by incoming mortars, the medic girl is killed. In

witnessing her death, Murph loses his last symbol of vulnerability, of compassion, losing also

his hope and his mind. Murph suffers a complete mental breakdown, leaving camp completely

naked and disoriented, seemingly in a trance. He is taken by an old man who leads him into the

dark. A search and rescue operation is organized, but they are too late. Bartle and Sterling find

him at the base of a minaret. Bartle description of Murph’s wounds is incredibly graphic,

exposing the brutality and cruelty of Murph’s death: his body was “broken and bruised” (206),

his eyes had been gouged out, the “two hollow sockets looking like red angry passages to his

mind” (206); his throat, nose and ears had been cut; he has been “imprecisely castrated” (206).

This scene is gut wrenching and horrifying. The detailed description of the corpse shocks

and nauseates, in spite of the many gruesome images provided in the narrative so far. The

graphic scene of Murph’s body would be the worst memory Bartle and Sterling could ever

endure – it would linger with them forever. Even Sterling - the tough, hardened sergeant - is

disturbed and defeated by the scene, blurting out: “Fuck, little man. You didn’t have to go out

like this,’ Sterling said to the body at his feet. He flopped down on his butt into the dry grass

and took his helmet off” (207). Immediately afterwards, they start to image what would happen

to Murph’s body from that moment on:

The body would be flown to Kuwait, where it would be mended and embalmed

as best as it could by mortuary affairs. It would land in Germany, tucked into a

sack of plain metal caskets as the plane refulled. It would land in Dover, and

someone would receive it, with a flag, and the thanks of a grateful nation, and

in a moment of weakness his mother would turn up the lid of the casket and see

her son, Daniel Murphy, see what had been done to him, and he would be buried

and forgotten by all but her… And we’d remember too, because we would have

had the chance to change it. (208)

9
 They decide, in an act of compassion, to conceal Murph’s body by placing him in the river

and letting it wash his body away. In that moment, Bartle and Sterling made a decision that

would change everything. Murph’s family would never achieve closure; his mother would

never know what happened to him. Such responsibility is a heavy burden to endure. Their guilt

would haunt them both after the war. In Bartle’s case, he is also burdened by his promise to

Murph’s mother, and the letter he wrote to her impersonating Murph. For both Sterling and

Bartle, that evening in Al Tafar would have very real consequences: Bartle is imprisoned

sometime after he returns home, and Sterling kills himself. The reader is only allowed insight

into Murph’s death at the end of the novel, which is symbolic of the manner in which the

traumatic experience is suppressed. The catharsis is only possible at the end; there will be more

on this further on.

For now, this monograph will focus on Bartle’s trauma and the manner in which he copes

with the events of war; little is shown regarding Sterling’s trauma in this sense. In order to

examine the effect war has on Bartle, this monograph will use Norris’s description of war as a

“world-unmaking event, a reality-deconstructing and defamiliarizing activity” (24). This

description resonates with the idea that

trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s

past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature - the way it was

precisely not known in the first instance - returns to haunt the survivor later on

(Caruth 4).

Thus it is not merely the brutality of war that traumatizes Bartle, but the manner in which

his whole identity is undone, in addition to the difficulty in processing the traumatic experience.

There are numerous instances indicating Bartle’s loss of identity, in relation to his sense of

manhood, cowardice, duty, patriotism. He is haunted by the lives he took in Al Tafar, but he is

10
twice as haunted by the reception he receives from civilians: not as a murderer, but as a hero.

To Bartle’s psyche, the civilians’ reaction is like

a deeper hole is being dug because everybody is so fucking happy to see you,

the murderer, the fucking accomplice, the at-bare-minimum bearer of some

fucking responsibility, and everyone wants to slap you on the back and you start

to want to burn the whole goddamn country down, you want to burn every

goddamn yellow ribbon in sight. (144)

To Bartle, being congratulated for his service and being called a hero is deeply disturbing,

and yet he feels he cannot complain because he volunteered to go to war. This is a common

theme of combat literature: men go to war as a rite of passage - a long tradition in which a

young boy must prove himself in order to become a man- but modern war shatters this ideal of

manhood, bravery, and patriotism. Bartle strongly experiences this crisis of identity at the height

of this post-traumatic stress disorder, as can be seen in the excerpt below:

you signed up to go so it’s all your fault, really, because you went on purpose,

so you are in the end doubly fucked, so why not just find a spot and curl up and

die and let’s make it as painless as possible because you are a coward and, really,

cowardice got you into this mess because you wanted to be a man and people

made fun of you and pushed you around in the cafeteria and the hallways in high

school because you liked to read books and poems sometimes and they’d call

you a fag and really deep down you know you went because you wanted to be a

man and that’s never gonna happen now and you’re too much of a coward to be

a man and get it over with so why not find a clean, dry place and wait it out with

it hurting as little as possible and just wait to go to sleep and not wake up and

fuck ‘em all. (144-146)

11
 Another common theme of war is brotherhood - the idea that war brings soldiers together

in a bond more powerful and ultimately unlike any other bond formed away from war. Although

the novel in part subscribes to this theme by highlighting the bond between Bartle and Murph,

it also debunks this ideal:

I couldn’t have articulated it then, but I’d been trained to think war was the great

unifier, that it brought people closer together than any other activity on earth.

Bullshit. War is the great maker of solipsists: how are you going to save my life

today? Dying would be one way. If you die, it becomes more likely that I will

not. You’re nothing, that’s the secret: a uniform in a sea of numbers, a number

in a sea of dust. (12)

In contemplating death in combat, soldiers also contemplate destiny. In the face of brutal

violence, one begins to search for a reason, or at least an order, to the chaos. Often this is

delegated to a higher power: God, Fate, the Universe. The idea of predetermination, or that a

set of events is already ordered and defined, is common in war literature. In the narrative, we

have an older narrator who is looking back to his younger self. Whilst the younger self believes

in this naive idea of predetermination, the older self debunks the idea. To him, there is no

destiny, no glory, and no order. There was only chance and, perhaps, luck:

We thought that if we remained ordinary, we would not die. We confused

correlation with cause and saw a special significance in the portraits of the dead,

arranged neatly next to the number corresponding to their place on the growing

list of casualties we read in the newspapers, as indications of an ordered war.

We had a sense… the names were there as soon as those portraits had been taken,

a number given, a place assigned. And that they’d been dead from that moment

forward. Of course, we were wrong… There were no bullets with my name on

12
 them, or Murph’s, for that matter.. We didn’t have a time laid out for us, or

place.... Nothing made us special. Nor living, not dying. Not even being ordinary

(12-14)

Another element to be observed in the narrative is that there is a period of time between

the trauma of war and Bartle’s response to it. For many soldiers, returning home is only the

beginning of a long process of dealing with grief, guilt, stress, and paralysis. According to

Stonebridge, it is central to trauma theory “the idea that an impression can be both experienced

and forgotten… trauma thus divides the mind not only from itself, but also splits it in time.”

(196) For many soldiers, the trauma is not only related to the atrocities experienced in war, but

also to the alienation felt upon returning home. Caruth calls this the “oscillation between a crisis

of death and the correlative crisis of life: between the story of the unbearable nature of an event

and the story of the unbearable of its survival” (7).

Certainly, Bartle experiences this crisis. He is, on the one hand, haunted by the trauma

experienced in war, and on the other he is paralysed by his own survival and guilt. Bartle is

traumatized by memories of war, memories which encompass many shocking, graphic scenes,

and dismembered bodies. Vieira writes that “war inevitably kills, mutilates, dismembers,

disfigures, and destroys human beings… Violence is not only present in war, it defines it.” (4-

5) The presence of death, and of the masses of dead bodies, can often be overwhelming and

even numbing during war. Another common theme of war novels is the desensitization in the

face of death:

Bodies were scattered about from the past four days of fighting in the open space

between our positions and the rest of Al Tafar. They lay in the dust, broken and

shattered and bent, their white shifts gone dark with blood… Nothing seemed

more natural than someone getting killed. And now... I can only tell myself that

13
 it was necessary. I needed to continue. And to continue, I had to see the world

with clear eyes, to focus on the essential. We only pay attention to rare things,

and death was not rare. Rare was the bullet with your name on it, the IED buried

just for you. Those were the things we watched for.” (11)

This desensitization, however necessary during the war in order to allow the mind to

withstand the brutality and the horror, is shattered once the soldier returns home. The

consequence of this is that veterans are often overwhelmed with the images of death, decay,

and violence. Caruth writes that the experience of the soldier “faced with sudden and massive

death around him… who suffers this sight in a numbed state, only to relive it later on in repeated

nightmares, is a central and recurring image of trauma in our century” (11). Caruth defines post-

traumatic-stress disorder as a “direct imposition on the mind of the unavoidable reality of

horrific events, the taking of the mind… by an event it cannot control” (58). Often retreating

into isolation, individuals suffering from PTSD are forced to confront the graphic, bloody

images they had suppressed in order to survive. This happens to Bartle; whereas before he could

view death as ordinary, after the war he is confronted with its brutality:

The ghosts of the dead filled the empty seats of every gate I passed: boys

destroyed by mortars and rockets and bullets and IEDS to the point that when

we tried to a medevac, the skin slid off, or limbs barely held in place detached,

and I thought that they were young and had girls at home or some dream that

they thought would make their lives important. They had been wrong of course.

You don’t dream when you are dead. I dream. The living dream, though I won’t

say thanks for that. (104)

In coming home, Bartle experiences a feeling of estrangement, in which “the usual had

become remarkable, the remarkable boring, and toward whatever came in between I felt only a

14
listless confusion” (103). This confusion grows into isolation and paralysis, two of the main

symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. There is a sense of stillness, of being stuck in time,

of lingering. He distances himself from everyone, experiencing shame and fear.

That spring whole days and weeks slept through and swept into the afternoons,

never seeing a soul… I remember myself, sitting in the dirt under neglected and

overgrown bush, afraid of nothing in the world more than having to show

myself for what I had become. Nothing is more isolating than having a particular

story. (132)

His routine is marked by repetition and a lack of motivation to live. Although Bartle takes

no action to end his own life, he often expresses the desire to just sleep and never wake up. He

cannot function amongst other people; he is ultimately a stranger in his own home. He wanders

aimlessly, following the same routes, to and fro the liquor store, numbing his senses and

avoiding his family and friends.

I’d developed the habit of taking long, aimless walks to fill the days… I was

tired of my mind running all night through the things I remembered, then through

things I did not remember but for which I blamed myself... I wanted to go to

sleep and stay there, that’s all. A passive wish, one I didn’t push. Sure, there is

a fine line between not wanting to wake up and actually wanting to kill yourself,

and while I discovered you can walk that line for a long time without even

noticing, anybody who is around you surely will, and then of course all kinds of

unanswerable questions will not be far behind (136-137).

In one episode, in August 2005, Bartle is walking near the edge of the river when he sees

his friends playing in the water. He sees them having fun, joking around, and overall being

carefree and young. Whilst he describes them as beautiful, he has to resist the urge to hate them.

15
These people, who were his friends before the war, are so removed from his current reality and

to think of the two of them coexisting is unimaginable.

They were my friends, right? Why didn’t I just wade out to them? What would

I say? ‘Hey, how are you?’ they’d say. And I’d answer, “I feel like I’m being

eaten from the inside out and I can’t tell anyone what’s going on because

everyone is so grateful to me all the time and I’ll feel like I’m ungrateful or

something... Or should I have said that I wanted to die, not in the sense of

wanting to throw myself off of that train bridge over there, but more like wanting

to be asleep forever. (144)

It is interesting to note that Bartle describes himself as a cripple. Although he has not

suffered wounds on his body, such as dismemberment and disfigurement, Bartle is suffering

from a wound of the mind, which he believes turns him into a “cripple”, a person who is not

whole or “normal”. This psychological wound is responsible for Bartle’s detachment and

paralysis. Up to this point in the narrative, the reader sees Bartle in a paralyzed state, suffering

from flashbacks, and retreating into isolation.

In this episode of the river, it is the first time in the narrative that Bartle breaks down. For

the first time, he verbalizes his feelings of inadequacy, shame, guilt and fear. His outburst is

overwhelming - for the first time he is removed from his paralysis and his feeling of paralysis.

It is here that he begins to create his own narrative and examine his own feelings of inadequacy.

However, this is not a cathartic moment for Bartle. In fact, Bartle’s emotional journey is bound

to get worse before it can start to heal. In tears, he enters the river and “drifted a little, a little

down, a little to sleep” (146). He has a dream about an injured horse entering the water as well,

the water cleansing his wounds and Bartle leaned in and put his arms around the horse, feeling

the “power in its bruised old muscles” (147). The horse is a metaphor for Murph, whose body

16
was also washed away by a river. They are both injured; whereas the horse has physical wounds,

Bartle has psychological ones. The water is cleansing their wounds, embracing them in a

soothing way. The horse’s “black and soft” eyes indicate tranquillity, acceptance. It might

symbolize Bartle’s acceptance of his death and perhaps the beginning of his acceptance of

Murph’s death.

Bartle’s moment of peace, however, is interrupted when he is pulled from the water by

his friends and the police. Although there are questions regarding his mental state, the police

does not force him to go through a psych evaluation out of respect for his service. This respect,

however, actually translates into a stigma of mental illness, especially in regards to veterans.

The idea that veterans just need to “keep it together [and they’ll be back] in swing in no time”

(147) ignores the trauma suffered by these veterans and the effects they have on veterans’

mental health.

Hunt writes that “social support consistently comes out as being the most important

factor concerning how people deal with stress and difficulty in their lives” (3) and that “low

perceived social support is seen as a predictor of traumatic stress” (3). Therefore, the

community’s dismissal of Bartle’s psychological trauma widens the gap between the civilian

and the returning soldier, further alienating and stigmatizing him. Hunt further argues that

we are natural storytellers and natural audiences. Narrative is an essential

function. We use and manipulate our memories, consciously and unconsciously,

in order to present ourselves to the world in a particular way. Our life stories are

constantly changing according to circumstances… We are compelled to narrate.

(3)

Bartle was “compelled to narrate” in his letter to Ladonna Murphy, justifying his action

as a “need for something to make sense” (30) that caused him to write to a dead boy’s mother.

17
Here, Bartle chooses to use fiction as to achieve order; he knowingly takes on the role of author

and recreates Daniel Murphy, the character and narrator, in that letter. He acknowledges that

Murph would not start a letter with “Dear Mom”, but still employs that in his letter. He does so

as a tribute to his friend, giving him a posthumous voice, using literature as a way to conciliate

what happened to Murph. The intention here, of course, is not appreciated by Ladonna Murphy,

who reads the letter not as a work of literature, but rather as a sinister attempt of impersonation

and cover-up. Whereas fiction has some liberties in dealing with truth and fiction, letters have

a testimonial quality to them, eliciting historical truth. Bartle, then, subverts the epistolary genre

by presenting the letter as a fake. He admits that it was a terrible thing to write the letter, but

adds that he did not know where the letter fit in with all of the other terrible things in his mind.

Regardless of his intentions, Bartle is arrested for writing the letter, eight months after

returning home from Al Tafar. He is sentenced to less than five years, to be remanded at Fort

Knox, Kentucky. Bartle’s time in prison is particularly significant in understanding the shift in

Bartle’s awareness of his own story. Earlier in the narrative, when he arrives in Germany, Bartle

comments on his struggle in understanding his own history – and story – at that point. He feels

an overwhelming ambiguity. He is unable to trust his own memories and grasp his own

experience, which can be seen in excerpt below:

(1) I had less and less control over my own history each day. I suppose I could

have made some kind of effort. It should have been easy to trace: this

happened, I was here, that happened next, all of which led inevitably to the

present moment…I realized, as I stood there in the church, that there was a

sharp distinction between what was remembered, what was told, and what

was true. And I didn’t think I’d ever figure out which was which. (60)

18
 Sometime later, when he is back in Virginia, Bartle comments on and defends the role

of imagination in relation to the role of history. The terms “history” and “imagination” are

analogous to what O’Brien deems “happening-truth” and “story-truth”. Although a more

lengthy discussion of this extract will be provided in chapter two, it is important to note that the

“story-truth” is connected to the cathartic power of narrative. The rope is a metaphor for the

narrative and it can be used as an anchor to a ‘farther shore’ - a metaphor for future in which

Bartle is freed from his paralysis. Still, he must first weave the rope back to the past – to the

cause of his traumatic memory, Murph’s death - in order to avoid “drownings”, a metaphor for

paralysis and death. Ultimately, his psychological recovery is connected to the need to construct

a personal narrative.

(2) The rest is history, they say. Bullshit, I say. It’s imagination or nothing, and

must be, because what is created in this world, or made, can be undone,

unmade; the threads of a rope can be unwoven. And if that rope is needed as

a guideline for a ferry to a farther shore, then one must invent a way to weave

it back, or there will be drownings in the streams that cross our paths. I accept

now, though in truth it took some time, that must must be its own permission.

(100)

Finally, when he is at Fort Knox, Bartle spends his first months “trying to place the war into

a pattern” (216) and eventually developing his own system behind making marks to “remember

a particular event, thinking that at some later date I could refer to it and assemble all the marks

into a story that made sense.” (216). However, as time progresses, Bartle realizes that

(3) the marks could not be assembled into any kind of pattern. They were fixed

in place. Connecting them would be wrong. They fell where they had fallen.

Marks representing the randomness of the war were made at whatever

moment I remembered them: disorder predominated. Entropy increased in

19
 the six-by-eight universe of my single cell. I eventually accepted the fact that

the only equality that lasts is the fact that everything falls away from

everything else. (217)

What these different moments in the narrative – numbered 1, 2, and 3 to facilitate analysis

- have in common is the preoccupation with history, memory, and narrative. In the first excerpt,

Bartle knows his own history/story is undefined, and, most importantly, he recognises the

flimsy distinction between memory, narrative, and reality (how something is remembered, how

something is told, and what is true). He comments, then, on the impossibility of distinguishing

memory from narrative, fact from fiction, “truth” from “lie”. In relation to the relationship

between ‘reality’ and fiction, Hunt argues that

while narration is about storytelling and the construction of narratives that may

relate closely to how events actually happened, or they may be largely fabricated,

the argument is not that we fabricate our lives, but that psychological reality is

more fluid, social and malleable than we usually think. (3)

Indeed, Bartle’s comment on the impossibility of distinguishing what is remembered and

what is told seems to be in correlation to Hunt’s idea that “there is now a blurring of the edges...

the distinction between memory and history has become blurred.” (6)

In the second excerpt, Bartle highlights the role of imagination and literature in the

construction of a personal story and how one is compelled to create in order to make sense of

the events of war. Again, this relates to Hunt’s understanding that

narrative is central to our understanding of self and identities. These narratives

depend on the social context, including the audience they are designed for, as

well as individual motivation and desires. Memory itself is constructed partly

through narrative and the social context. (6)

20
 In the third excerpt, Bartle’s preoccupations are essentially literary. His concern is that of

the author, the narrator. He is making the point that, if war is chaotic and random, then war

literature must endeavour to recreate in parts the randomness of war. This means focusing on

precise episodes, however non-chronological they may be, instead of connecting these episodes

in a cohesive plot, with a beginning, middle, and end. Bartle’s concern can be understood in

McLoughlin’s notion that

war reconfigures time as well as space. Conflict calls forth an increase in

temporal expressions… Wartime is two-fold: both the duration of a conflict and

how time is experienced within it. Defining the former and characterising the

latter are both problematic. To ascribe a start and an end to a conflict is to emplot

it, and emplotment is the beginning of interpretation and hence controversy.

(Authoring War 107)

In short, then, what these three excerpts have in common is the metafictional quality of

the ideas discussed in them, as well as the evolution of the narrator’s state of mind and

awareness. The aim of this monograph is to examine Bartle’s metafictional concern regarding

memory and narrative in relation to the traumatic experience of war, which will be done in the

following chapter.

3. METAFICTION IN WAR NARRATIVE

Metafiction is most broadly defined as a mode of fictional writing which “self-

consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose

questions about the relationship between fiction and reality” (Waugh 1). Specifically, it

functions through exaggeration of “the tensions and oppositions inherent in all novels; of frame

and frame-break, of technique and counter-technique, of construction and deconstruction of

21
illusion”. (Waugh 14) In other words, works of metafiction tend to explore the relationship

between truth and fiction, by exposing the narrative as “artifice” and by deconstructing the

formal conventional organization of the novel, such as verisimilitude, credibility, chronology,

and frame. Still, metafictional literary texts often function by “preserving a balance between

the unfamiliar (the innovatory) and the familiar (the conventional or traditional)” (Waugh 12).

O’Brien suggests that without “the grounding reality, it’s just a trite bit of puffery, pure

Hollywood, untrue in the way all such stories are untrue” (80).

Not all metafictional works, however, aim to expose fiction as an “artifice”, but rather

focuses on the consciousness of the narrator. Waugh examines some alternative definitions of

self-conscious writing; most significant to this monograph is the mode which she refers to as

the “self-begetting novel”. Kellman defines the ‘self-begetting novel as “an account usually

first person, of the development of a character to a point at which he is able to take up and

compose the novel we have just finished reading” (qtd. in Waugh 14). Waugh adds that “the

emphasis is on the development of the narrator, on the modernist concern of consciousness

rather than the post-modernist one of fictionality” (14).

In light of the discussion provided above, this monograph will argue that The Yellow

Birds can be considered a “self-begetting novel” since the focus of the novel is on the narrator’s

conscience regarding the narrative rather than the examination of truth and fiction.

Alternatively, The Things They Carried examines not the narrator’s conscience in the manner

of the self-begetting novel, but the issue of truth and fiction in the war narrative and proposes

a theory of “true” war fiction. Since this monograph relies on some of the ideas proposed by

O’Brien, it will briefly discuss metafiction in The Things They Carried before analysing The

Yellow Birds as a ‘self-begetting’ novel.

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 The first element to be considered is that the novel is signed as a “work of fiction by Tim

O’Brien” but, on the following page, there is a dedication to the men of Alpha Company, “in

particular to Jimmy Cross, Norman Bowker, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Henry Dobbins, and

Kiowa” - who are fictional characters in the novel. To Silbergleid, this statement “elevates these

imaginary characters to the level of real people worthy of a dedication” (129), which is only the

first instance in the book in which fact and fiction are blurred. Perhaps the most significant

element regarding this discussion is what Silbergleid calls “autobiographical metafiction”. She

claims that

O’Brien’s narrator makes liberal use of history (his story) to develop and

organize the fiction. Indeed, despite the collections self-consciously fictional

status, O’Brien incorporates undeniably autobiographical elements, such as a

character named Tim O’Brien who is a writer and a Vietnam vet, a writer, like

O’Brien himself, who went to graduate school at Harvard and then published a

novel entitled Going After Cacciato and a memoir, If I Die in a Combat Zone.

(129)

According to Silbergleid, O’Brien employs this technique in the narrative in order to

call attention to its apparent basis in reality, reasserting what many readers take

to be the central premise, or promise, of mimetic representation, that life will be

mirrored in the book. However, this mimetic gesture inevitably frustrates

newcomers to O’Brien’s work, for as soon as the narrator declares something to

be true, he inevitably confesses he made it up, putting history itself in question.

(130)

Silbergleid further comments that perhaps this technique

23
 provides a means of engaging the ethical problems involved in writing about

traumatic material, material for which the issue of the “true” of the “real”

necessarily remains in questions. For this reason, the Tim O’Brien character

functions not as an unquestioned appeal to the truth vis-à-vis personal

experience, but as a rhetorical or performative strategy. (132)

Indeed, O’Brien’s strategy of presenting a “fact”, and then proving it false, is essentially

metafictional. The strategic use of autobiography serves to grant him credibility and ensure that

readers will accept his novel as factual rather than fictional (Silbergleid 137). By providing

tensions in the narrative – between what is “real” and what is “fictional” – he questions the

relationship between reality and fiction in the novel, under a guise of truthfulness and

believability.

Similarly, O’Brien aims to question the relationship between reality and fiction in the war

narrative genre. His metafictional task is to discuss the writing process and its political,

rhetorical, ethical, and aesthetic implications. (Silbergleid 143) To do so, he creates a ‘theory

of true war fiction’, a set of rules regarding war narratives. O’Brien’s first concern is part

ethical, part political. According to him, a true war story must not be moral, nor attempt to

encourage virtue. O’Brien warns the reader that

If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel

uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from

the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible

lie. (65)

This ‘old and terrible lie’ refers to one of the first functions of war literature: to act on the

imagination of the young and instill values of honour, heroism, and courage (Brosman 86).

24
Literature has often been used to promote a sense of national purpose, inciting men to join the

military and sacrifice themselves for their nation. Alternatively, it has also had a prominent role

in confronting such ideals. Wilfred Owen, the famous British WWI poet, wrote against this

terrible lie in his poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” seen in the extract below, denouncing the line

from the Roman poet Horace, which roughly translate to “it is sweet and glorious to die for

one’s country”:

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est

Pro patria mori.

Similarly, O’Brien warns against war stories that instruct and suggest models of proper

human behaviour, because such literature seeks to indoctrinate young men rather than expose

the true experience of war - the brutality, the chaos, the overwhelming ambiguity. In order to

avoid being manipulated by this lie, by the rectitude and virtue, O’Brien establishes then that

readers can tell a true war story by its “absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity

and evil” (66). This means that a “true” war story will not omit the atrocity, the brutality and

the injustice of war in favour of propaganda.

Another key element in O’Brien’s theory of “true” war story is the questioning of truth in

the narrative. He makes a distinction between “happening-truth” and “story-truth”, in which the

latter is essential in making the experience of war truthful to those who were not there - even if

25
the factual truth does not correspond to the story-truth. To O’Brien, a true war story does not

depend on factual truth. To him, “a thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not

happen and be truer than the truth.” (79) This means that the narrator’s impression of the events

are more meaningful than the concrete facts.

As O’Brien puts it,

what stories do, I guess, is make things present. I can look at things I never

looked at…The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that

others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and

imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. (171)

Here, O’Brien uses metafiction to defend the aesthetic role of literature in portraying the

personal experience of war truthfully, in opposition to historical accounts, which relay the facts

but attach no meaning to them. What distinguishes literary expressions of war from historical

documents is the emphasis on experience. Literature captures the subjective manner in which

combat is experienced by those involved in it (Brosman 85). According to Brosman,

this subjective mode is what readers seek in works in the imaginative

mode, as opposed to histories; they bring a type of satisfaction different

from that of simply knowing the facts and carry a mark of authenticity

and truth that, paradoxically, more objective stories rarely attain. This

authenticity and satisfaction come from a powerful appeal to readers’

imaginations through identification with characters and their emotions

and through literary language. (85-86)

This manner in which war is experienced, then, becomes the central topic of many war

narratives. Once transmitted into narrative, this truth “as it seemed” often appears surreal and

26
ambiguous. Such ambiguity seems to be symptomatic of the surreal nature of war and its

alienating power, in which an individual’s sense of the definite and of truth itself is lost

(O’Brien 76).

In O’Brien’s words,

in any war story, but specially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened

from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening

and has to be told that way… For the common soldier, at least, war has the feel

- the spiritual texture - of a great ghostly fog, thick, and permanent. There is no

clarity… The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths are no longer true.

Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness

into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery… the only certainty is

overwhelming ambiguity… it’s safe to say that in a true war story nothing is

ever absolutely true. (76)

In telling the true story as it seemed, O’Brien attempts to place the reader in the position

of the narrator. He aims not to organize the experience of war, which in itself is overwhelmingly

chaotic - to remove the ambiguity and surrealness - but to successfully portray the first-hand

experience of combat to the reader. In order to be believable, the war story must “make the

stomach believe” (O’Brien 74), it must connect with the reader on a deeper level. The narrator’s

aim is to create a bond with the reader to evoke a primal, emotional reaction (Silbergleid 132).

This reaction does not depend on factual truth, but to the manner in which a story is told. It

depends on the ‘story-truth’ and on the artifices used by the narrator in constructing the

narrative. According to Timmerman,

27
 War stories must evoke the dreams and lives of individual soldiers, as opposed

to giving a statistical or historical accounting of data… What happened in the

hearts and minds of the soldiers who fought that battle is not conveyed by

clinical data. To uncover that is the task of fiction. (101)

Moreover, the metafictional discussion of the role of the narrator emphasizes the

relationship between him and his reader. This communication is essential in the war narrative,

often because of the narrator’s need to communicate the “truth”. Yet what is the truth? To

O’Brien, there is no clarity - the truths are contradictory. To tell a true war story, one must avoid

generalizations (75). In doing so, one might successfully relay the experience of war and evoke

a “gut reaction” from the reader. In O’Brien’s words,

How do you generalize? War is hell, but that’s not half of it, because war is also

mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and

pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling;

war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead. (75)

The war experience is not straightforward. There is not one story, but many. The narrator

writes about the past, recounting the experience from memory. O’Brien writes that “sometimes

remembering will lead to a story” (36) and” that “stories are for joining the past to the future”

(36). Two problems arise, then, from this situation. First, that memory is unreliable, especially

memory that draws from a traumatic experience. The writer must translate this traumatic

memory into the narrative, often resulting in the surreal quality and ambiguity mentioned above.

The second problem regards the multitude of stories which exist in war. How does one select

which stories are depicted in the narrative? Should the writer focus on a particular story, a

particular event, or attempt to comprehend this multitude of events? This, of course, is the task

28
the writer must undertake. O’Brien’s metafictional concern with the process of selection is

shown in “Spin”:

The thing about remembering is that you don’t forget. You take your material

where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection of past and present.

The memory-traffic feeds into a rotary up on your head, where it goes in circles

for a while, then pretty soon imagination flows in and the traffic merges and

shoots off down a thousand different streets. As a writer, all you can do is pick

a street and go for the ride, putting things down as they come to you. (33)

The excerpt above shows the connection between memory and imagination. The material

for the narrative comes from “the intersection between past and present”, in other words, from

the intersection between “reality” and memory. This material “goes in circles for a while”,

meaning that the memories of the war, before they can be translated into narrative, are in a state

of suspended repetition. Only with imagination are they able to “shoot off in a thousand

different streets”, or a thousand different stories. The following excerpt highlights the role

imagination and language have in removing memories from this state of suspended repetition

and bringing them to life in stories.

The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might

dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language

combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness… That’s

what a story does. The bodies are animated. You make the dead talk. (O’Brien

216-219).

O’Brien seems to defend imagination, or fiction, as essential in translating the

experience/memories of war into stories. Once again, he chooses “story-truth” over

29
“happening-truth”, fiction rather than ‘reality’, in creating an emotional connection between

author and audience. Even so, some narrative strategies must be employed in order to evoke

from the audience an appropriate reaction, and the most common is the appeal to a sense of

veracity within the novel (Burns 2). According to Burns, the emphasis on the first-hand account

of the individual soldier, the creation of complex characters, yet adhering to certain established

military types (the tough sergeant, the incompetent second lieutenant), and the use of recurrent

war fictional themes add to this verisimilitude. In any war story, believability is key to making

the readers connect to the difficult experience being conveyed.

As such, even O’Brien, who aims to question the relationship between truth and

fiction, seeks mimetic credibility, primarily by using the first-hand account and

autobiographical metafiction, as discussed above, in accordance with Waugh’s idea that

“metafiction explicitly lays bare the conventions of realism; it does not ignore or abandon them.

Very often realistic conventions supply the ‘control’ in metafictional texts, the norm or

background against which the experimental strategies can foreground themselves” (18).

Metafictional authors aim to explore these elements within the narrative, at the same time

employing and deconstructing them, and ultimately commenting on the writing process itself.

In this monograph, the relationship between history, memory, and narrative, in relation to the

theory of true war fiction discussed above, will be key in analysing metafiction in The Yellow

Birds.

3.1. Metafiction in The Yellow Birds

In a thorough reading of The Yellow Birds, it is possible to identify several instances in

the narrative that fit into O’Brien’s theory of “true” war fiction, discussed above. The main one

30
is the sense of moral ambiguity. One cannot find, in the novel, attempts to moralize or instruct

the reader. There is no attempt to justify death, or the war itself. Rather, the novel exposes the

overwhelming ambiguity felt by the narrator, Bartle.

I know it was a terrible thing to write that letter. What I don’t know is where it

fits in with all of the other terrible things I think about. At some point along the

way I stopped believing in significance. Order became an accident of

observation. (31)

The lack of purpose is evident even in the beginning of the novel. The sense that war drags

on, that it seems eerie, endless, and meaningless. There is no motivation, no moral superiority

or the ideal of greater good. In fact, the soldier’s only purpose is to “go on, only to go on” (4).

We knew the muezzin’s song would soon warble its eerie fabric of minor notes

out from the minarets, calling the faithful to prayer. It was a sign and we knew

what it meant, that hours had passed, that we had drawn nearer to our purpose,

which was as vague and foreign as the indistinguishable dawns and dusks from

which it came. (7)

This ambiguity and purposeless translate into a feeling of estrangement, of vagueness.

This relates to O’Brien’s theory that, when told “as it seemed”, a war story evokes the feeling

of confusion, or what he deems ‘a ghostly fog.’ This feeling of estrangement and moral

ambiguity is recurrent in war fiction. Certainly, it can be seen in this novel, especially when the

soldiers are under attack:

The orchestral whine of falling mortars arrived from all around us. Even after so many

months beneath them, there was a blank confusion on the faces of the platoon. We stared

at one another with mouths agape, fingers strangling the gripe of our rifles…I remember

31
 feeling like I jumped into a cold river on the first warm day of spring, wet and scared

and breathing hard, with nothing to do but swim. (19)

Additionally, one important aspect to be considered in the novel is the fake letter written

by Bartle in relation to what O’Brien’s classifies “happening-truth” and “story-truth”. The letter

is the perfect example of the tension between “story-truth” and “happening-truth”. Bartle

knowingly chooses to recreate Daniel Murphy in that letter, as both a character as a narrator.

He chooses fiction over testimony, perhaps in an attempt to give his dead friend a last chance

to speak, or to grant Ladonna Murphy the farewell she was denied. According to O’Brien’s

theory, then, the letter can contain its own kind of truth, which does not correspond to the

happening-truth. Predictably, perhaps, Ladonna Murphy mistakes the “story-truth” as an

attempt to mask the “happening truth”, and through her efforts Bartle is imprisoned by military

police. He is arrested by a CID (Criminal Investigation Command) agent a few months after

returning to Richmond, Virginia, due to Murph’s mother’s appeals to the press and pressure put

on the U.S. Armed Forces to discover the truth about her son’s death. This seems to suggest

that the “story-truth”, when dealing with “real” people and not fictional characters, might not

be understood outside the frame of the narrative itself – to write this type of narrative, then,

might involve the risk of misinterpretation and accusation from others. Although The Yellow

Birds does not focus on the metafictional questioning of reality and fiction, this episode seems

to defend the role of the “story-truth” in the war narrative, at the very least in relation to Bartle’s

consciousness at the time of writing the letter.

Another important element subscribing to O’Brien’s theory is the individual

perspective. The autobiographical account is essential to war narratives because it “offers the

epistemological guarantee you can believe it because I saw it happen” (Authoring War

McLoughlin 42). In this novel, it provides essential awareness into Bartle’s state of mind and

32
his trauma. Similarly, the first-hand account is essential to the “self-begetting” metafictional

novel because it documents the protagonist’s evolving consciousness to the point of writing the

novel itself. Indeed, it is possible to track Bartle’s consciousness throughout the novel, in the

three excerpts analysed in the first chapter of this monograph, not only in relation to the

metafictional concern with narrative, but also in relation to his trauma. For the purposes of this

monograph, the three excerpts below have been numbered to facilitate analysis:

1) I had less and less control over my own history each day. I suppose I could have

made some kind of effort. It should have been easy to trace: this happened, I was

here, that happened next, all of which led inevitably to the present moment…I

realized, as I stood there in the church, that there was a sharp distinction between

what was remembered, what was told, and what was true. And I didn’t think I’d

ever figure out which was which. (60)

2) The rest is history, they say. Bullshit, I say. It’s imagination or nothing, and must

be, because what is created in this world, or made, can be undone, unmade; the

threads of a rope can be unwoven. And if that rope is needed as a guideline for

a ferry to a farther shore, then one must invent a way to weave it back, or there

will be drownings in the streams that cross our paths. I accept now, though in

truth it took some time, that must must be its own permission. (100)

3) the marks could not be assembled into any kind of pattern. They were fixed in

place. Connecting them would be wrong. They fell where they had fallen. Marks

representing the randomness of the war were made at whatever moment I

remembered them: disorder predominated. Entropy increased in the six-by-eight

universe of my single cell. I eventually accepted the fact that the only equality

that lasts is the fact that everything falls away from everything else. (217)

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 In the first excerpt, Bartle begins to question his “history”, or his memory of the events

which took place in war. He describes a sense of confusion, a loss of control regarding his own

understanding of the past, regarding his memories. Bartle’s consciousness of his “history” is

still tentative, influenced by his inadequacy. At this point in the narrative, which is the first

“post-war” instance in the novel, Bartle manifests symptoms of PTSD, experiencing paralysis,

guilt, and numbness. There is no clarity, not in relation to his trauma and especially not in

relation to his own experience, but there is the overall feeling of ‘loss of words’, which seems

to inevitably emerge when dealing with remembering and representing war. He questions, then,

memory itself, and in doing so questions his perception of “truth” and the manner in which that

‘truth’ is portrayed. His concern with “memory” (what was remembered), “narrative” (what

was told) and “reality” (what was true) is metafictional, but Bartle is unable to offer an in-depth

discussion of these ideas because he himself is overcome by doubt and ambiguity.

In the second excerpt, however, Bartle begins to show a more developed awareness of

“history” and “imagination”, in which history can be interpreted as O’Brien’s “happening-

truth” and imagination as “story-truth”. Similarly to the instance of the letter mentioned above,

Bartle is defending the use of “story-truth” over “happening-truth” in the narrative, due to its

ability to create, to invent, to look forward into the future (‘a rope to a farther shore’) or

flashback to the past (‘one must weave it back’). This ability is intimately related to the cathartic

power of narrative, and how that catharsis can be achieved. The rope (story) can be used as a

guideline to a ‘farther shore’ (the future) – a future in which Bartle is freed from his paralysis,

but he must first weave the rope back to the past – to the root of his trauma - in order to avoid

“drownings”. In other words, healing comes from looking at the past, from confronting and

processing the trauma; only then the future is a possibility. If one attempts to move on without

looking back, there will be ‘drownings’ – not only metaphorical drownings, but actual

drownings, which nearly happens to Bartle. Imagination, then, through the narrative, will aid
34
Bartle’s overcoming of his trauma - writing is imperative. At this point in the novel, Bartle is

processing his war experience, and by looking back he is able to begin his long journey of

recovery. He is far from being healed and able to construct the narrative (the key element in

identifying a self-begetting novel), but he does begin to make sense of the past and the narrative.

The excerpt shows the start of his discussion of a non-chronological structure in the novel, in

which it is possible to rearrange time and events. His ideas are still not fully developed, but they

are clearer than in the first excerpt. This non-chronological structure hinted at here will be the

focus of the next excerpt.

In the third and final excerpt, Bartle is at the ‘end’ of his long journey looking into his

trauma and the narrative. His consciousness has evolved from confusion to paralysis, and,

finally, to clarity. At the end of his journey, Bartle is able to develop a system, or a structure,

to his story. The chalk marks on the wall represent particular events, and not a plot with cause

and effect. Each mark has a corresponding significance. There are so many of them that the

guard mistakes them as a way to keep track of time. He chooses not all, but some of those

episodes in constructing his narrative (the one the reader has been reading). His “chalk-mark”

process appears to allude to O’Brien’s “memory-traffic” one. Both of them represent the

existence of a multitude of stories and highlight the author’s need for selection. In the “memory-

traffic” process, the memories of war are suspended in a cycle of repetition, until imagination

transforms them into narrative. Similarly, in the “chalk-mark” process, Bartle’s traumatic

memories were suspended in paralysis due to his PTSD, locked into his mind until his use of

imagination enabled these memories to be understood in the form of narrative. The liberation

of these memories is cathartic to Bartle and his consciousness at the end of the novel is free

from numbness and confusion. Whereas before he experiencing paralysis, shame, and

alienation, at the end of the novel he has come to accept his own past and guilt. He uses non-

chronological structure to represent the randomness of war and, so, he avoids connecting these
35
episodes. His concern here is with language, with the manner in which his narrative will be

constructed. Whereas in the previous excerpts he questioned his memory and defended the role

of imagination, now he is concerned with the structure of the novel. He seems to connect

memory, imagination, and language to create his own narrative, in the same manner in which

O’Brien connects these three elements in The Things They Carried. The combination of

memory, imagination, and language enables the creation of a narrative that successfully

portrays the author’s experience of war as it seemed to his readers.

It is clear, then, that Bartle’s consciousness evolves throughout the novel, not only

in his understanding of the narrative - in relation to the ideas of memory, imagination, and

language - but also in his understanding of his own “story”, of his traumatic experience in Al

Tafar. The reader witnesses Bartle’s development as an author and a victim of trauma. In war

narratives, one cannot be separated from the other. Only through the developing of his

consciousness and the creation of a personal narrative, he is able to come to terms with grief,

pain, fear, and inadequacy. The reader sees, then, two Bartles, two voices, one who is in the

process of coping with his trauma and is just beginning to discuss narrative, and another who

has already gone through this process and is authoring the story the reader has just read. As

such, the novel is able to transition smoothly between past, present, and future, by using

elements of foreshadowing, flashbacks and flash-forwards. Ultimately, the self-begetting war

novel must account for the development of the protagonist’s metafictional consciousness as

well as for his achievement of traumatic catharsis through literature.

Perhaps the most important thing to understand about catharsis is that it does not

mean forgetting, or erasing the past. It is about acceptance, about making amends – conciliating

the past, taking responsibility. In truth, to be removed from a paralysed state is to finally

confront one’s pain and be able to tell others about it. In Bartle’s case, the final crucial step in

36
his recovery was to meet Ladonna Murphy and take responsibility in his part in her suffering,

evidenced in the excerpt below:

I didn’t know what to say to her at first, but it seemed unfair that she had to bear

it like this, to be responsible to start, so far away from any comfort or

understanding. And if she should accuse, then I should be accused. His absence

from the family plot was my fault. I had left him in the river. I had feared the

truth on her behalf and it had not been my right to make that choice for her. Her

grief was dignified and hidden. (219)

Some years after their significant encounter, Bartle is out of prison and living alone in a

cabin at Blue Ridge. His grief is no longer paralysing, but has matured into a quiet, fading

companion. He comments on his fading memory, finally starting to envision a future in which

the trauma of the war will not dominate his life. This moment is extremely significant in the

narrative because it shows insight into a future Bartle who was able to overcome his paralysis

through the creation of his own narrative.

All of that was a long time ago. My loss is fading too and I don’t know what is

becoming. Part of it is getting older, I guess, knowing Murph is not. I can see

him getting farther away in time, and I know there are days ahead when I won’t

think of him or Sterling or the war. (223)

Significantly, the final page of The Yellow Birds is a tribute to Murph. Here, Bartle is

looking not at the future, but is finally conciliating Murph’s death, coming to terms with his

friend’s fate and finally giving him a proper farewell. This tribute is the most powerful defense

of “story-truth” over “happening-truth” in the novel. In imagining Murph’s long journey along

37
the Tigris, towards the open sea and towards peace and acceptance, Bartle is able to give his

friend the burial he deserved, but never received.

I saw Murph as I’d seen him last, but beautiful. Somehow his wounds were

softened, his disfigurement transformed into a statement on permanence… I saw

his body finally break apart near the mouth of the gulf, where the shadows of the

date palms fell in long, dark curtains on his bones, now scattered, and swept

them out to sea, toward a line of waves that break forever as he enters them.

(226)

4. CONCLUSION

McLoughlin writes that the challenge for texts of war is “to end without ending” (132).

Perhaps the same can be said about research regarding works of war fiction. As thorough as

this monograph has attempted to be in the discussion of trauma, representation, narrative, and

metafiction, there is still much to be explored in The Yellow Birds and it would have been

impossible to account for the richness of the novel without going beyond the purposes of this

monograph. To write about war is to write about human beings experiencing unspeakable

horrors, brutality, trauma, and suffering, whether it be on the battlefield or in returning home.

Often to write about war is also to write about the difficulty in communicating the experience,

as well as the difficulty in accessing one’s own traumatic memories. To research metafictional

texts of war is to understand the role trauma plays in the construction of the narrative and to

document the self-consciousness of the narrative.

38
 This monograph highlighted in the first chapter some key ideas in theories of trauma

which are essential to the discussion of The Yellow Birds, such as the idea that a traumatic

experience can be suppressed, and relived at a later date. The idea that post-traumatic stress

often involves symptoms of repetition, alienation, and numbness, and that veterans can

experience a “crisis of life” and a “crisis of death”: the dichotomy of being traumatised by the

horrors of war and being equally traumatised by the fact that they survived the war. Perhaps

most important is the idea that the experience of war demands to be narrated, at the same time

that doing so often feels like an impossible task to the veteran, and that writing about war can

have a cathartic quality for the traumatised narrator.

In The Yellow Birds, the monograph discussed Bartle’s trauma and his post-traumatic

stress disorder, hence the focus on Bartle’s consciousness. The root of Bartle’s trauma lies in

Murph’s brutal death, as well as in the horrors witnessed and committed in war. Most

importantly, he is plagued by his own role in denying Ladonna Murphy closure regarding her

son’s death. Bartle’s consciousness is, at first, paralysed by his trauma and his guilt. He is

unable to create a narrative for himself, to make sense of the events that traumatise him, and so

he struggles to communicate with others, further retreating into isolation and depression. Bartle

experiences a loss of identity, in relation to his sense of manhood, cowardice, duty, and

patriotism. In returning home, he experiences inadequacy, repetition, guilt, and isolation.

Gradually, the reader witnesses Bartle’s overcoming of his paralysis through the creation of his

personal narrative.

This monograph has argued that Bartle’s overcoming of his paralysis – or his catharsis

- is a product of the development of an awareness of his personal story as well as his evolving

awareness of the narrative genre itself. Focusing on three particular excerpts from the text, this

monograph has managed to document Bartle’s consciousness of the narrative throughout the

39
story. This evolving consciousness – of a personal story and of the metafictional discussion of

narrative - coincide in these three moments in the story.

In the first excerpt, at the same time Bartle struggles to understand his own history/story

and documents a feeling of overwhelming ambiguity, he is beginning to manifest symptoms of

post-traumatic stress disorder. His confusion manifests itself both in relation to his coping with

his traumatic memories and his conception of a personal story. At this point, Bartle’s

consciousness is numbed, paralysed, and unable to process his past or his trauma. As such, his

understanding of his own experience is thwarted. In the second excerpt, taking place later in the

narrative, Bartle begins to discuss and defend the role of imagination in the narrative, even if

tentatively, whilst halfway through his cathartic journey and experience intense feelings of

alienation, depression, and suffering. Whereas before Bartle had begun to feel confusion and

alienation, at this point he is at the peak of his post-traumatic stress disorder, his symptoms

extreme and debilitating. Ironically, it is at the height of his pain that he begins to confront the

past as well as communicate it.

Finally, in the third excerpt, Bartle provides a more developed perspective of the

narrative. He is able to develop a system, a structure, to his story – a “chalk-mark” process that

aims to recreate the chaos of war and avoids linear chronology. This “chalk-mark” process is

similar to what O’Brien called a “memory-traffic” process of writing in The Things They

Carried: the traumatic memories are suspended until the use of imagination enabled these

memories to be understood in the form of his story. The combination of memory, imagination,

and language enables the creation of a narrative that successfully portrays the author’s

experience of war as it seemed to his readers. The construction of this “chalk-mark” process is

cathartic to Bartle because it liberates his memories from that state of suspension and paralysis.

At this point, his consciousness is free from the paralysis, shame, and alienation he was

experiencing at the peak of his post-traumatic stress disorder. He is able to look objectively at
40
his own story, as well as take responsibility for his actions. Although Bartle is not completely

over his trauma at this point, his consciousness has definitely grown and improved since the

previous excerpts.

This monograph has examined O’Brien’s theory of “true” war fiction and identified

in The Yellow Birds some elements subscribing to this theory, such as the feeling of

overwhelming moral ambiguity, vagueness, and the distinction between “history” and

“imagination” which are analogous to O’Brien’s “happening-truth” and “story-truth”. It has

shown how Bartle’s consciousness evolves throughout the novel, not only in his understanding

of the narrative - in relation to the ideas of memory, imagination, and language - but also in his

understanding of his own “story”, of his traumatic experience in Iraq. Furthermore, this

monograph has argued that this evolving consciousness is key to understanding The Yellow

Birds as a self-begetting novel: a metafictional novel concerned with the consciousness of the

narrator. The reader witnesses Bartle’s development from a point of paralysis and impossibility

of lucidity to the point in which the narrator overcomes this paralysis and is able to construct

the narrative the reader has just read. The singularity of the self-begetting war novel is that the

narrator develops both as an author and as a victim of trauma, and in this way the traumatic

catharsis is connected to the awareness and the construction of the personal narrative.

41
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