John Hersey’s writing career was mostly dedicated to writing compositions about important and moving events in history. Because the United States of America is one of the pioneer in both World War I and World War II, the American-born John Hersey saw things firsthand, if not had an easy access to information. He wrote articles about the fighting in Europe, Asia and several parts of the world.
His most famous work is “Hiroshima”, a non-fiction account based on the battle in Japan during the World War II culminating in the dropping of the atomic bomb. The article “Hiroshima” written by John Hersey was first published on August 1946 in The New Yorker Magazine. It was published a year after the end of the World War II. The article is based on personal interviews conducted by John Hersey with the survivors of the war, most especially the atomic bomb.
Because of its popularity and the attention that it drew, it became a book few years after. Basically, the article revolves around the experience of six (6) survivors of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima – one of the two cities bombed with the atomic weapon; the other is Nagasaki. Among the six survivors are two doctors (Terufumi Sasaki and Masakazu Fujii), two religious ministers (Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German; and Reverend Kioyoshi Tanimoto, a Japanese Methodist) and two women (Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk; and Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, a tailor’s widow with six children).
All with different experience and points of view about what happened. The way and structure John Hersey developed his article recreated the experience of the war and the bombing. He basically didn’t inject any personal opinion in the article. All that were stated and written in the article are personal accounts and statements of the six survivors. The emotions flooding in the article all belong to the real victims of the war and not just of a writer who was able to interview and got the story.
John Hersey’s style is to show the stories of six (6) different people who experience the bombing and consolidate them in a manner that will relive what happened as a general rule and its effect to the majority. The story behind the experience was extracted by the way John Hersey asked questions in the interview. And instead of making an article based on true-story, he created a very sensible set of questions that will answer all readers’ questions given the chance to ask the survivors.
What John Hersey did was effective in evoking empathy because the readers feel that the survivors were directly talking and relating to them. It seems that the article is the survivors’ way to appeal to the world to stop whatever the root of the problem which resulted to such a horrible experience that they had to go through. Because statements written in the article were directly quoted from the survivors, there is a less number of readers who are skeptic whether or not the article is fictional.
If the article Hiroshima hadn’t been in the form of personal interview, it will be effective but not as appealing as the current version. Readers will still feel the emotions of the survivors but not a effective as that in the form of personal interview. There will be an aesthetic factor that has the tendency to exaggerate certain situations and events to make the story more appealing. And readers have an instinct to realize when a story is real or being exaggerated for selling purposes.
Hiroshima in its original form is one of the best in its genre. It hit the empathy of the readers while sharing a piece of Japan’s history in a very truthful way. The six survivors were from different walks of life; so even if John Hersey didn’t interview a significant part of the population, the story can be considered as an average feeling of the Hiroshima bombing survivor. There are different ways to write an article and different causes.
Some writers make stories just for fun; some compose articles to inspire people; some simply make stories. In the case of the Hiroshima article by John Hersey, he created an article to show the real score of the bombing and how it affected the lives of normal people. Because of the articles effect on the emotions of the readers, John Hersey succeeded in his purpose of showing how ugly war is.
Author: Shelly Austin