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Yuen’s strength is to take Hiroshima and couch the text in tiny fragments of detail that personalize the tragedy: Yuen guides the reader in garnering meaning. We understand the U.S. role in Hiroshima not through detailed reports of the targeting strategy or the debate about how many Allied casualties the bomb would save, but through Yuan telling us that the Enola Gay’s pilot, Paul W. Tibbets, Jr, named the plane after his mother
. We understand the effect of radiation sickness and burns not by looking at image after image of mottled and charred corpses, but through an account where the narrator tells us of skin slipping through his fingers. Yuan creates meaning by making the readers interaction with the text intimate and human, poetic rather than statistical. And he continues to do so even when describing the very bomb, Little Boy, which is about to fall upon Hiroshima. |
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