Humans have always been very sympathetic, we feel bad when someone is killed and happy when someone is born. Our ancestors weak physical abilities compared with animals forced us to develop stronger emotional connections with each other in order to survive. These emotions are really brought out in the book “Hiroshima”, by John Hersey and the movie Barefoot Gen, by Keiji Nakazawa. Both of these were made to try to show the devastation caused by the bombing of Hiroshima. “Hiroshima” is a book that tries to tell the stories of six survivors. Whereas Barefoot Gen shows the story of one survivor with a detailed plot and character development. The short choppy story segments in Hiroshima leads the reader to feeling less sympathy for the survivors,…
In “Hiroshima”, the story is broken down into segments that jump all over the place and describe the different events from different points of views. There are six survivors that share their stories in “Hiroshima.” The author must leave out all the detailed background information and character development because there is not enough room to include that for six characters. Whereas, Barefoot Gen is a much more traditional style story. In Barefoot Gen, there is a clear plot and the author develops the characters which makes the reader feel much more connected to the main character, Gen. This character development increases the tragedy of the bomb for the viewer, because they feel sorrow for the character which makes all the events seem much more traumatic. For example, what would seem worse to you? Having your friend die, or having someone die in a far corner of the earth. We always have stronger emotions when something bad is happening to someone we know, and Barefoot Gen does a great job of making Gen seem like someone we know. The reason we feel like we know Gen is, there is about an hour of film before the bombing where all we see is the life of Gen, in which we begin to sympathize for him because of the problems his family is…
