Hiroshima Themes

In the very first sentence of Hiroshima, John Hersey conveys the shock and disorientation of the Hiroshima bombing on August 6, 1945. Early in the morning, Hiroshimans were going about their business, utterly unaware that the American military, fighting in World War Two against Japan, was about to drop an atomic bomb on their city. The next day, American forces dropped a second bomb on the city of Nagasaki—altogether, these bombs claimed more than…

In Hiroshima, John Hersey writes about six main characters who were living in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, but were far enough from the city center that they survived the bombing. In the immediate aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing—when the city was engulfed in flames, food was scarce, and many must have thought that the world was coming to an end—these characters faced impossible decisions about how to survive and whom to help. Unlike…

The atomic blast over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 is over in a matter of seconds. And yet the residents of Hiroshima who survived the explosion remember it in vivid detail for the rest of their lives. For most of the book, and especially in the book’s final, long chapter (which was written forty years after the bombing), John Hersey studies the way that Hiroshimans cope with the disaster—an event so vast and destructive that…