Hi, Charlie here.

“Hiroshima” is narrated from the view of a child. You can sense this from start: the words are mostly one syllable: "Keep a straight back" and "The floor is still cold from night and stings my knees" (163). The narrator uses a lot of repetition, like using the word “spirit” repeatedly in the first paragraph (163) and “soybean” (165). This gives the impression of a limited vocabulary. The extended vocabulary and knowledge comes up when the child narrator recounts knowledge about war that she has learned from her father or school: “Honorable death before surrender” (163), or “That is a B-24. That is a B-27. And that is a B-29” (172). This makes it clear how directly the war is affecting the narrator’s childhood: her childlike voice is disrupted by the information about the war that surrounds her.

            Repetition is used in other ways as well. The idea of safety comes up multiple times, referring to the narrator and her family in the country and the city (168, 169, 175). Not only does this show how important safety has become in the narrator’s world, but it creates as strong irony at the end when her family in the city are killed. Another important repeated phrase is “Don’t blink” (171, 174, 177), which first comes up in reference to the photo the narrator’s family took together and later to the flash of the atomic bomb that kills the narrator’s family. Repeating the phrase draws a chilling connection between the happy events in the narrator’s life and the harsh reality of the war that is going on around her.