The New Hiroshima Hotel: A Soldier's Journey?

ultimately accepts that she will never have her soldier again. Sorrowfully, she repeats over and over again, “I bequeath you to oblivion” (Hiroshima 79). In her own perception of grief, she believes she must continue to remember that the soldier is gone forever, despite the pain caused by remembering. It is a kind of pain and anguish she continues to bear because the act of forgetting, to her, would be equatable with allowing her commitment to descend to the Kierkegaardian “lower immediacy.” The shackles of her despair never truly leave her in the fear that her defining commitment, her very love for the German soldier, might lose its meaning. Hence, her memories serve a purpose similar to the cell in which she was confined in as punishment for her affair. Even after she grows older, is physically freed from the cell, and goes on to marry and have children, she still finds comfort in her undulating grief. This coexistence of repose and anguish is the kind of serenity that a Knight of Resignation …show more content…
It is not that he disregards the gravity of the disaster that befell his family and Hiroshima; rather, he is able to incorporate that disaster into his everyday life, in such a way that memorializes his defining commitment to Hiroshima and expands his gates to new opportunities. Whereas the French woman works as an actress, playing roles in war films that allow her to relive and preserve her experiences, the man works in fields like architecture and politics which seek to rebuild a “New Hiroshima” that transcends the one that was destroyed. Both she and him undergo the movement of resignation, as they know they will never be able to fully restore what was lost. One cannot be both a Knight of Resignation and a Knight of