Question

What qualities of character did Sadako show during her illness?​

Answer 1

Answer:

Sadako

Character Analysis

The novel’s protagonist, Sadako Sasaki is a spirited and ambitious eleven-year-old girl with a passion for running free. Sadako was only a year old when the nuclear bomb was dropped on Hiroshima nine years previously (at the end of World War II), but swears she remembers the heat and light of the blast as clearly as if it were yesterday. Sadako’s enthusiasm for celebrating life is sometimes mistaken by her mother and father as disrespect for the past. She longs to join the racing team at her junior high school next year, though as she begins running small races against her friends at school, she finds herself growing dizzy and faint rather quickly. Sadako is soon brought to the hospital where she is diagnosed with leukemia, an effect of the radiation from the nuclear bomb that still lingers throughout Hiroshima. As Sadako struggles in the hospital, her friend Chizuko instructs her in the art of folding paper cranes, and Chizuko gives Sadako hope with by telling her the legend that anyone who folds one thousand cranes is granted their wish—Sadako’s, of course, is to be healthy again and return home to her family. As Sadako’s illness worsens, she is comforted by her family, her friends, and others in the hospital—a boy named Kenji, whose passing shows her the freedom death can offer for those who are truly ill, and her kind caretaker Nurse Yasunaga. Though Sadako eventually perishes, she comes to accept the freedom death represents, and her illness—the casualty of a tremendous act of violence—becomes a rallying call for her community as they finish folding one thousand paper cranes in the name of peace, unity, and kindness on Sadako’s behalf.