Birdsong (novel) on how the novel, like many other WWI novels, thematically focuses on the way in which the experience of trauma shapes individual psyches. Similarly, because of the parallel narratives WWI and 1970s Britain, the novel explores metahistorical questions about how to document and recover narratives about the past. Because of its genre, themes and writing style, the novel has been favourably compared to a number of other war novels, like Ian McEwan's "Atonement" and those in Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy. "Birdsong" is part of a loose trilogy of novels by Sebastian Faulks, alongside "The Girl at the Lion d'Or" and
Birdsong (novel) authors and historians in trauma as a thematic subject. The historian Ross J. Wilson noted that this reinvestigation of the traumas of the World Wars revisits and revives the experience of trauma within contemporary culture. Faulks uses both different narrators and different narrative perspectives (first, third and omniscient) on the death in the trenches to explore the trauma of death in numerous and challenging ways. For Mullen, this gives the effect of "[t]he novelist painfully manipulat[ing] the reader's emotions." The novel frequently changes narrative perspectives, using a significant amount of interior monologue, direct speech and dramatic irony. Though employing an