SPEECH ACTS AND MORAL INJURY IN KEVIN POWERS'S NOVEL “THE YELLOW BIRDS”

This article offers a reading of Kevin Powers's The Yellow Birds (2012) that brings together speech act theory, the concept of moral injury, and the narratology of time. Most criticism of the novel has approached it through trauma theory, treating Private John Bartle as a witness disabled by an experience he cannot assimilate. The present study argues instead that the novel's ethical and formal centre is not an unspeakable event but a spoken one: the promise Bartle gives to Daniel Murphy's mother, before deployment, to bring her son home. Drawing on Austin's and Searle's conditions for felicitous performatives, Felman's account of the promise as a scandal of the speaking body, Derrida's notion of iterability, Arendt's philosophy of promising and forgiving, and the moral injury model developed by Shay and by Litz and colleagues, the article traces a chain of speech acts: the promise, the forged letter, the institutional rhetoric of honour and gratitude, and the narrator's belated testimony. A chapter-level reconstruction of the novel's alternating chronology shows that Powers organises time around the known outcome of a failed commissive: the reader learns early that Murphy will die and that a letter will be forged, so that interest is displaced from what happened to how a promise came to be broken. The article concludes that The Yellow Birds gives moral injury a narrative form, that its ending replaces forgiveness with testimony and resignation, and that the novel registers, more than its critics allow, the Iraqi lives consumed by the cover-up.