Hiroshima

John Hershey combines six individual narrative threads to create Hiroshima. These six narratives are rooted around one singular event, the “noiseless flash,” which changed their lives forever. I think Hershey does an excellent job intertwining the narratives to portray the events before, during, and after the atomic bomb explosion. Stories that include multiple narratives can be tricky for readers to understand. The abundance of characters and the events that happen to each individual character can be difficult to follow. Hershey introduces all of the characters with a long connected sentence, telling the reader what each person was doing just before the bomb fell to the ground. Hershey throws the reader into the story right off the bat, excluding any long drawn out history lesson on the war.

I also noticed that he shaped the entire narrative around intricate recollections from the characters, and he weaves these stories with those of the other characters even though they are often unrelated. I think he took great care in shaping these individual narratives and breaking them up in order to be woven more carefully with each other. I found that at the end of each small section, just before he introduces the narrative of another character, he ends on a dramatic detail or some detail that makes the reader curious as to what happens next. I don’t think that these points cut of the narrative at a bad time because Hershey picks pivotal areas that won’t harm the reader’s interpretation of the events but sort of pause one story and begin another weaving them along the way. For example, Hershey writes, “As Mrs. Nakamura started frantically to claw her way toward the baby, she could see or hear nothing of her other children” (13). That is a moment where Hershey leads off and then begins another story and we’re left wondering.

The narrative as a whole is only broken up into four separate sections. For a story this short and the amount of narrative detail, the limited number of chapter interruptions is essential for the flow of the narratives. I can only imagine the lengths Hershey took to create this story. The amount of detail he had to uncover of the six narratives and turn them into one solid narrative must have been a tremendous feat. And to think he created a piece that took up the entire issue of the New Yorker with such detailed and traumatic stories. The stories he researched could have probably consumed many, many books with the amount of information that was available.