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Hiroshima And Virginia Woolf's The Death Of A Moth

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Manipulating Moments in Time: Comparing John Hersey’s Hiroshima and Virginia Woolf’s The Death of a Moth
Time can be manipulated in several different ways in writing, whether through sentence length, detail, time skips, flashbacks, flashforwards, or any number of other strategies. In their pieces Hiroshima and The Death of a Moth, John Hersey and Virginia Woolf use several techniques to manipulate moments in time; in the beginning of Hiroshima, Hersey prolongs and relives the moments before and during the detonation of the atomic bomb above the city of Hiroshima, while Virginia Woolf stretches out moments in time as a moth flutters along a window sill and dies in her essay The Death of a Moth. There are several different strategies used in the first two sentences of Hersey’s Hiroshima and sentences three through seven of Woolf’s The Death of a Moth in order to manipulate how readers perceive time within the author’s writing, and while both authors are machinating the readers’ experience of time, they do so in very different ways.
In Virginia Woolf’s The Death of a Moth, Woolf manipulates moments in time is by extending the sentence lengths in her writing. In the first paragraph of her essay, she elongates a momentary …show more content…

Whereas Woolf relies on sentence length and structure and detail in order to manipulate the readers’ perception of time in her essay The Death of a Moth, Hersey relies on the use of semicolons to make readers relive a moment of time from different perspectives and uses details to enrich the description of the experience in his story Hiroshima. While John Hersey and Virginia Woolf use different strategies to alter their readers’ experience of time in their writings, both pieces are extremely effective in their individual manipulations. If either author were to use the other’s strategy in their writing, it wouldn’t work half as well as it does in the original

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