Previous
Chapter 6
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Yellow Birds, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
War, Violence, and Detachment
Memory and Trauma
Companionship vs. Solitude
Justice, Morality, and Guilt
Summary
Analysis
During that entire spring after coming home, Bartle sleeps most of the time, noting the hour of the day by the sounds of children getting on and off the school bus. Bartle’s only activity is to go buy a case of beer every afternoon at a local store, making sure that no one sees him. Bartle feels both ashamed and scared of being seen for who he truly is, as he feels degraded. He tries to make himself as discrete as possible in his mother’s house, drinking the beer in the kitchen and watching the woods through the window.
Bartle’s growing addiction to alcohol reveals his desire to forget everything and escape the oppression of his memories and this current life in which he does not fit in. His fear of being discovered for who he is suggests that he feels like an impostor, incapable of sharing his deepest fears or weaknesses with anyone, as well as his realistic experience of the war.
Active
Themes
Bartle finds that everything he does reminds him of Iraq. Once, when his mother asks him to repair the fence, he hears a crow caw and, thinking that the sound signals mortars falling, tries to protect himself. Afterwards, he notices his mother at the window and waves at her. Overall, he feels as though he is at the edge of a cliff and wants to fall, thinking that he cannot bear another day, yet finding that he is breathing and must go on, unable to actually fall.
If Bartle felt that he had no control over his life during the war, he soon discovers that he is in a similar situation back home, where he might have agency over his actions but cannot keep unwanted memories from emerging. His efforts to pretend that all is well only increase his solitude, as he cannot share this burden with anyone.
Active
Themes
Bartle sometimes wakes up wishing he did not have to live. Even though he does not actually want to kill himself, he knows that if people were to become aware of his state he would have to answer uncomfortable questions. One morning, his mother comes to him with the phone, telling him that his friend Luke is going to the river the next day with friends. Bartle asks her to tell him he is too tired to talk. His mother agrees to do so but insists that Bartle at least think about going, which causes Bartle to explode, saying that all he does is think.
Active
Themes
Bartle gets up from bed, feeling raw pain all over his body, and walks down to a pond by the house, where he finds a place he used to go to as a child. He sees the initials J.B. carved into the barks of many trees and concludes that they must be his, even though he does not remember making them. This makes him smile. He sits down for a while, but when the heat becomes too intense, decides to walk toward the city on the train tracks.
Active
Themes
Get the entire The Yellow Birds LitChart as a printable PDF.
"My students can't get enough of your charts and their results have gone through the roof." -Graham S.
Unable to keep thinking about Murph, Bartle walks back to his mother’s house, puts some belongings in a duffel bag, and leaves. Although he tries to concentrate on his memories of Murph, he finds that they are unreliable, as he succeeds in recovering some memories while others fade away. He remembers a story Murph told him about a dozen canaries his father bought. When the father opened up the cages, he was surprised to find that, after singing for a little while, the birds decided to return to them instead of flying away. Going through his memories of Murph, Bartle finds that his image of his friend is fading away and turning into a permanent absence which cannot be filled, even as he misses him dearly.
Active
Themes
Taking the railway tracks toward the city, Bartle feels that he is walking aimlessly and finds that he has gone far, already reaching the river, and that the sun will soon set. When he feels a train approach, he slips down at watches it pass by, looking for a place to jump on but finding none. Bartle observes the trees and the city in the distance, finally falling asleep next to a fire he makes.
Active
Themes
Bartle wakes up in late morning. He hears music and noise nearby and sees Luke with a group of friends. Bartle washes off in the river and walks toward the city, then back toward the river, where he finds a recently deserted campsite. He takes off his clothes, starts a fire, and enters the water. When he sees how beautiful Luke and his friends look, he wants to hate them, feeling that he has become a “cripple,” unable to express himself.
Active
Themes
In an ironic tone, Bartle concludes that it would be impossible for him to tell his friends that he feels destroyed on the inside and that he cannot stand to tell people this because everyone is always congratulating him. He also cannot say that he wants to die because he has killed people, sometimes shooting them more times than necessary, and that these actions—which he knows are wrong and he will never find absolution for—are eating away at him, even though his own mother is proud of him.
Bartle adds that he failed to protect the one person he had promised to keep safe, and that he saw death so often that he became inured to it, to the point of only feeling sad for dead animals. By contrast, everyone is so happy to celebrate him, even though he is a murderer and should bear some responsibility for the horrors committed in Iraq. He feels that he wants to burn the country down and destroy all the yellow ribbons, even though he knows that joining the military was his own decision—one he made simply because he wanted to become a man, which will never happen now, because he has proven that he is a coward who only wants to die.
Night falls. Walking in the river, Bartle starts to cry and lets himself float on the current, as he watches the moon and begins to fall asleep. He wakes up abruptly to the sound of people yelling to get him out and pushing on his chest for him to spit water out. Luke had called 911 when he saw Bartle floating on the river. When the police arrived, they did not make Bartle take a psychological test because of his military background. Instead, they take him home and try to give him encouraging words about getting better soon.
Active
Themes
When Bartle’s mother sees him walk through the door, she grabs his face, saying she thought she had lost him, to which Bartle replies that he is fine. She says she is worried about him and adds that she has been getting calls from a captain from the Criminal Investigation Division (C.I.D.). At these words, Bartle goes to his room and closes the door, hearing his mother ask him repeatedly what happened in Iraq. Bartle feels this is an unanswerable question, because there is no way to give meaning to what happened.
Active
Themes
