Ameer's Q2 Benchmark -- Changing World Essay
Quotes on the Book
On a large scale, the world changing has little impact on the outcome of the universe. Of the 7 billion people on earth, a person’s impact to the Earth has even smaller impact. While the impact a person has on the universe may be very little, as a collective group, the impact it has on the world in which they live is very large. However true this may be, their efforts are done without true purpose, and are for the most part, done for the sake of doing it. The truth of the matter is, in real life not everyone is a main character.
Within the first couple of pages, the story that The Yellow Birds had constructed so far had begun to build up a character. It seemed like he wasn’t just any random character, but instead somebody with a name, and a family. Malik was a student of literature, indigenous to Iraq, and the university of which he studied closed. With little opportunity to further his education he turned to America to become a translator for the U.S. troops. Malik, on the side he thought just, putting himself and his family’s life on the line, died shortly after first meeting the troops. Malik died and that was that, as if his entire back story didn’t matter. “ I didn’t think about Malik much after that.” (pg. 12, Bartle). No one cared about the death of Malik. Even though he had left himself vulnerable, and became acquainted with them, in the end his life didn’t make any impact. A living being took use of his talents and services, but when all was said and done, nothing really would have changed that much if he wasn’t even there at all. He was forgotten about, anyhow.
In the author’s note of the book I pulled out a quote that leads to answering the question of what it was like in war “over there”. In answering this question the author noted that war was pretty much unique, being only like itself. While noticing war’s uniqueness, he also noticed something about people. “People, however, are all the same...” (Reading group guide pg. 2, Authors Note). The author, Kevin Powers, explained that in order to understand what it was like “over there” you must first understand that essentially all experiences are the same. No matter how different our experiences may seem, we are all as alike as our “breath and blood”. There is very little difference in any task we perform, because it really is in no way unique or special. This raises the thought, everything is just a repetition of itself. If it has already been done or felt before, there is really no sake in doing it.
Taking a step back from main characters, and how not everyone is one, we can take a look at one of the main characters of the book. Looking at the character Murph, it is easy to decode a sense of acting without true purpose. Going through the war, ending a countless number of lives, he died. The young man still had much of his youth, he had a life to return to after the war, much more he could have accomplished. Still he died, and life would have to reshape itself around that fact. Though, life had not reshaped that much, because the only way to deal with his death was to pretend “like it never happened Bartle. That’s the only way.” (pg. 211, Sterling.) This is what Sterling said to Bartle after they witness their comrade's dead body floating down the river. Murph’s life must have been of little importance if the only way to deal with his passing was to erase his very being from the existence of the earth. All Murph had done in the war must really have been for nothing.
The author explains a sort of powerlessness in Bartle through a few interviews he had based on this book. Bartle was not able to be good. Out of this inability to do (whatever he thought was) good, it can be said that he did didn’t have the impact he wanted it to have. This specifically is not to say that he was completely impactless, but it does say to him that his actions were meaningless. The quote states, “the root of his guilt was that he wanted to be good, and he tried to be good, but he failed. His conflict is between his desire to redeem that failure and his acceptance of complete powerlessness.” Powerlessness accurately describes a person failure to impact, thus describing Bartle’s ultimate meaningless even as a main character. This article explains how little Bartle’s impact on the world was, while in another article he mentions how impactless everything is in relation to any other thing. In this article he says, “It's trying to allow for multiple things to be happening at the same time…” “to be very narrowly focused on the interior experience, but also to have a sense of expansiveness…” “I find this push-pull between the microscopic and the telescopic…” “I'm trying to evoke that clash of small and large scales, and the difficulties of locating oneself. I'm interested in, Where am I?” When answering the question of why he moved around a lot in the book, Kevin Powers answered with “difficulties of locating oneself.” This quote brings a realization that many things are happening at one time. There is no one point in time, no one place on a map. In this expansiveness of a collective of the Universe, there is no one person qualified to be a main character. Kevin powers wanted to answer the question “where am I” in writing this book, and during this process he choose to write about characters with complete powerlessness. He chose to write about people who, in the end never really mattered. He chose to do so because in finding one’s self, you find that you aren’t the most important person in the world. You find that in reality, you’re powerlessness has little impact in the grand scheme of things, despite where you are or where you may end up to be.
The point of the thesis is to help people understand that no one is really that special, and that while it may seem that someone’s life doesn’t have any meaning and may be pointless; it can become clearer to understand that no one’s life really has any meaning. Everyone is in the same boat. There is not true importance to meaningness, because in reality there is no true point to anything at all.
Works Cited
Kevin Powers, The yellow birds
"Kevin Powers, In and Out of Conflict." Interview Magazine. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Jan. 2015.
http://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/kevin-powers-letter-composed-during-a-lull-in-the-fighting#_
"An Exclusive Interview with Kevin Powers, Poet and Iraq War Veteran, about His Debut Novel, The Yellow Birds." Foyles. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Jan. 2015.
Personal Narrative
In the book the yellow birds, I became attached to a character in less than a page. I enjoyed this character, because even though I didn’t really know him, I didn’t really know the other characters either. I liked this character because he was something different. He wasn't just an ordinary U.S. Soldier. However, just because I thought he was unique didn't mean he was important in any way and he died. This sort of thing I can relate to a special person who is no longer in my life. My mom's mom always made me call her Nana. She said because she didn't want me to call her grandmom because it made her sound old. I stressed to her that it made her sound older anyway. She ended up dying when I was young even though I didn't want her to. Now that I think about it, I think over all her contributions in life and how very little I can think of. To me her greatest contribution was making me happy, but what does that really mean to the world? I don't think that question really matters. Not everybody has to be a main character.
My Nana was about 20 years older than my mother. My mother is about 20 years older than me. When I was about five or six she was probably just leaving her 40’s. Despite her age she would watch cartoons with me every saturday I came over her house. We’d play a game of Yu-Gi-Oh (cards) occasionally, because Yu-Gi-Oh was one of our favorite shows. She often called me sweet pea and called my mom shug (I thought of it as sugar). To me she was probably one of the sweetest old lady’s you could ever meet, but many would say she was neither sweet nor old. She smoked menthol lights and was one of the few people of the 21st century who still kept a tab at bars. She’d swear at least 100 times a day and didn’t bother to kill roaches when they crawled across her coffee. She was wonderful to me, and I would have fun every moment I spent with her, regardless of if we were at bingo or even a thrift store.
I went to live with my Nana around the middle of the first grade. My mom wanted to move out of her apartment but she had to save up some money first. There were only two bedrooms in the hose, and the one I slept in with my mom didn’t have a bed. The first night we slept there I was almost certain I would sleep on the floor. That’s when Nana made both of us bed cots from folding a blanket a couple of times. I thought it was genius, and that there was nothing my Nana didn’t know. Of course I couldn’t sleep without my night light, no matter how much it bothered the light sleeper, my mom. Around these times I never really thought of anyone as a main character. Life was about life, and I never really thought there was a purpose to it. However, as a child, my purpose never really important anyways. I always focused on the now.
Just around my middle school years was when Nana died. By that time the only real time I spent with her was when she was in the hospital or going to dialysis. Smoking caused her to have kidney failure, plus all the other problems that came along with it. There were still times when we had fun, as though she was 40 again. I remember one time we wandered around Penn’s Landing. It was warm out with a black sky from the dark of night. That night was the fourth of July, and we had just gotten off the buss to see some fire works. The thing that stood out the most to me that night was not those fire works. However, it was the fact that Nana wasn’t wearing any shoes. There was broken glass all along the curb, and the asphalt was scorching when I knelt to feel it. Curious, I asked why she didn’t have shoes on. She said something I only vaguely remember. Something about her dialysis treatment and other things about her lungs and physical health. None of the glass or the hot asphalt bothered her, because her feet were so swollen from liquid she couldn’t really feel it. It was her bad kidney’s fault. Even though this was a completely horrible thing, in my child state of mind I thought it was cool. How hardcore would it be to feel numb to the pains of sharp objects and scorching surfaces. Despite how cool I thought she was; if I was bored the time I spent with her seemed pointless.
Up to her passing moment I felt it tedious to go to her hospital bedside. I felt gratitude in sleeping in the car while my mother was the only one to go in and visit. I remember the smile she had every time she saw me, and how she always talked about telling other old people about me. Still, as a child this did not make me want to hug her. I would smile with full attention for one second, and then quickly avert my attention to whatever I randomly felt like looking at. It isn’t as though I didn’t smile every time I saw her. It isn’t like I didn’t wish she would get better. Though, better to me meant at her house on a saturday morning playing a game of Yu-Gi-Oh. It isn’t like I didn’t cry at her funeral (though more so from the pressure of people expecting me to cry); but I wished for the rush of the casket to be in it’s grave when that time came. It’s because when that time came, my feet were starting to hurt, and the lengthiness of the funeral had become boring. I felt this way because as a child I always felt as though I was the main character without even thinking about it. It took maturing for me to realize life is not all about me.
Now as I am older I wish I had spent more time with my Nana. The details of her face are slowly fading away from my memory, and I wish I could have made her happier in her last moments. I could have brought a deck of Yu-Gi-Oh cards with me to the hospital. I could have watched cartoons with her as she lay there without visitors on a saturday morning. Maybe that would have made her want to live a little bit longer. Maybe she would have smoked a little bit less… because I don't’ remember her as the woman who smoked herself to her deathbed. I remember her as an old friend, Evelyn Harris, who loved me and became a child again every second I spent with her. Even though I feel as though neither of us was the main character; and that each of our existences on this earth is without true motive and pointless; we didn’t need a purpose to be happy.
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