Author(s): Mohammed Burhan Kakakhan

Abstract: War Literature is as old as war and literature themselves. However, in the twenty-first century fiction, it has other techniques that grant it its originality and difference. This study explores one of the nonliner narrative type which is flashback in two war novels published in the twenty-first century. These are Kevin Powers’s The Yellow Birds and Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale. Both of the novels are American. However, they tackle different wars as Powers’s novel evolves around the American war on Iraq; whereas Hannah’s novel is about World War II and Holocaust. Actually, both of the novels depend on flashback technique to narrate the events by the first narrator. Nevertheless, Powers’s flashback technique comes from the veteran’s heavy memories with difficult moments and sufferings as his novel is a semi-autobiography of his experience in Iraqi war as an American soldier. Whereas Hannah’s flashback technique comes from her reading about the war and her imagination of a fictional story about a woman narrating the story of her sister, a heroine used to save the Western pilots in WWII. So, this study is a comparison study between these two post-modern novels in relation to the flashback technique used in each of them. The study is a literary criticism of the fictional narrative and it analyzes the texts according to the style and language of each novel. The study seeks to find out the similarities in the flashback technique in these novels and unveil the differences. The skillfulness of each novelist in using this technique is also exposed in this study. The conclusion comes to sum up the findings that both novels have the post-modern narrative technique using flashback memory in a nonliner way. However, the flashback technique in Powers’s The Yellow Birds is the outcome of a post-traumatic soldier’s memory and unconscious narrative. So, there is such haziness in incidents’ narration and no clear border between reality and imagination as well as present and past. Hannah’s flashback also comes from a burdened memory of a woman recalling her past; yet, it is more symmetric and fictional than Powers’s flashback narration.

Pages: 341-345 | Views: 66 | Downloads: 24

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