"Hiroshima" - Shannon Walsh

Nam Le's "Hiroshima" reads like a stream of consciousness narrative, which allows us to have a deep understanding from the character's point of view. The narrator's thoughts are flooded onto the pages with little to no structure to them. The story does not use the traditional formatting for dialogue between characters. Instead, we hear these conversations from the narrator's point of view as she speaks back and forth with her family members, teachers, and other background characters. This limited scope is powerful, as the conversation is interpreted by the narrator, who happens to be a young girl growing up during World War II living in Hiroshima. Her perspective is interesting as she sees things differently from adults and as readers we must infer what she is actually talking about. For example, she often talks about the radio "wheezing and coughing." From this naive, childish perspective, we must conclude that the radio is not actually sick- it is perhaps playing the sounds of the bombs falling over her home country. We also see her confusion and misunderstandings of everything that is happening in the historical context of the story. She lives a naive, impressionable life while she tries to make sense of the things happening around her. She does not understand where her brother went, or why her mother would cry often, or why her parents sent her away to the temple. The perspective of the young girl is particularly interesting and at times we must make sense of what she is saying and experiencing based both on historical background knowledge as well as her dialogue with the adults in her life.