A Journey Traveled Through Pain Imagine being involved in a bloody massacre and watching your community dissipate into the dusk. Picture dodging the piercing bullets as they whisk past innocent ears. Envision your home turning into a battle ground, breaking up into military bases—flipping the world upside down. (nice capture tactic) This was peoples’ lives for many years, beginning in the 1960’s, during the Civil War in Sierra Leone. (need a transition---how does Beah relate to civil war aforementioned—I think I follow and understand but you did not explicitly state, which is always necessary when essay writing) A Long Way Gone is a memoir written and lived by Ishmael Beah. He writes with an intense tone and strong demeanor with his diction, …show more content…
The style contained a series of complete and complex sentences that were often repeated throughout the second half of the novel. For example, multiple pages state, “[v]isualize the enemy, the rebels who killed your parents, your family, and those who are responsible for everything that has happened to you.” In the memoir, this line was placed in italics to create a dramatic look for the audience. It needed to be reinforced because it gave a sense of pain, and became important to show the intensity of the army training. People were brainwashed and told to kill everyone and everything. Also, rhetorical devices were not incorporated lightly. On page 108, Ishmael said, “[h]e smiled at us, lifted his gun, and fired several rounds toward the sky. We dropped to the ground, and he laughed at us as he went back inside.” Irony became common in this book when the war broke out. Lives were turned around, and people were not being themselves; Ishmael, at the age of twelve, became addicted to cocaine, marijuana, and brown-brown (a mix of cocaine and gunpowder). The way the words were organized, and the way they were communicated, became special and original. (you are discussing SYNTAX here, rather than rhetorical