Home as the territory of certainty: more notes on Kevin Power's "The Yellow Birds"

Private Bartle, the protagonist of Kevin Power's The Yellow Birds, returns from Iraq having lost his faith. Not his faith in God or any particular religion, but the belief that the world makes sense, observes an order, has a meaning we might get at. He says, "At some point along the way I stopped believing in significance. Order became an accident of observation"(32-33).  He and his fellow soldiers spend a lot of time trying to look at he carnage around them and to draw sense and comfort from it. When a comrade dies, they see it as confirmation that they are less likely to. They imagine they are too small and insignificant to get killed. In hindsight, with a costly wisdom, Bartle realizes, "we were wrong. Our biggest error was thinking that it mattered what we thought"(13). Visiting a cathedral in Germany on his way back, he thinks he "could have picked up a handful of dirt from the street outsie, some wax from a candle on the alterpiece, ash from the incense as it swung past. I could have wrung it out, hoping I might find an essential thing that would give meaning to this place or that time. I did not. Certainty had surrendered all its territory in my mind"(60).

As Bartle is flying back to Richmond, from his one year tour, he has a moment where a thought slowly crawls across that attention of his consciousness. He begins to think, 'I want to go.....,' but he can't complete the thought for a moment. Only after a few seconds does the word "home" cross his mind. Although he doesn't quite know consciously what to make of this funny delay in the expression of his desire, it points to the fact that Bartle will have a hard, maybe impossible, time coming home. It doesn't exist as it did.

Home is a place of certainty. It is a center that lends you all your frames of references. It is where you have family and friends who love you and lend you a sense of your own significance. You matter because you matter to your loved ones, all the people back home. But, if the idea of certainty and significance have been blown away, torn from one like a limb, it is also hard to re-establish the authenticity, or truth, of home.

Bartle certainly doesn't feel it. At some point, in Iraq, he has lost his faith and his feeling of home. He can no longer imagine himself at home as he was. As he and his mother cross the James on a bridge into Richmond, he doesn't recall how he spent his youthful days on the river but instead sees himself as a soldier and imagines how he would navigate along its shore in the face of a hostile enemy. When he finally enters the room he grew up in, he's afraid to remove his army gear. As he removes it piece by piece, he fears "disappearing." He adjust slowly to being home. He stands in his room and is surrounded by a world of familiar smells and sounds but now "it was all filler. The noise, the  sound, they existed  just to take up space. My muscles flexed into the emptiness I still called home"(111).