Hiroshima In John Hersey's Hiroshima And Nagasaki

John Hersey’s short novel Hiroshima pays tribute to the stories of several survivors of the 1945 atomic bombing at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hersey documents the unique lives of each of these survivors, including how each person spent the moments leading up to the bomb, how they reacted to the bomb, how the bomb affected their life afterward, and other general information about the person. Hersey ends the book with an uncomplicated statement about how “his memory, like the world’s, was getting spotty” (152). The final line in the novel provides a depth of insight about how society moves on from events such as this one, including how it remembers the bombing, how its attitude about it changes, and how its views on nuclear weapons change over time.

An ABC News article, written by lecturer Sofia Ahlberg, suggests that the world is losing this important piece of history due to the simple fact that “there are only few references to the bomb in contemporary culture.” Ahlberg discusses a few prominent examples of literature that are about the incidents at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and explains how fear has caused many people to shy away from reading about such a devastating topic. She also “insist[s] on the need to reflect on the horrors of warfare and put pressure on the way we choose to either talk or keep silent about the darkness of humanity.” Ahlberg accentuates a similar point to Hersey; as time goes on, people forget about the utter destruction caused by humans. She focuses on the idea that people do not remember the event often enough for it to remain a clear part of history, which is why society has lost some of the once full awareness of the