Sterling's Rift: Perception in The Yellow Birds Anonymous 12th Grade

In his novel The Yellow Birds, Kevin Powers takes the reader into the mind of a soldier. This work evokes not only the physical duress of fatigue and fighting, but also the emotional stress and the long-lasting trauma that remains with a soldier even after he’s come home from the war. Powers teaches the reader about the struggles when a young soldier leaves his home, and his family, to serve his country, through the many different types of characters he introduces the reader to throughout the novel. For some of those characters, the life of a soldier is a source of disconnect and even downfall.

Among the central themes in The Yellow Birds is the sensation of exile. The circumstances in this form of exile would be the war and the need for soldiers, and the young boys in this novel enlist themselves for the good of their country. Exile is “the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted”(Said). Soldiers who are separated from their families, and especially for the younger ones it leaves them with traumatic experiences that no one else can relate to, forcing these young men and women to distance themselves from society. Most...