Analysis Of A Long Way Gone By Ishmael Beah

Nic Gonet

Mrs. Knebel

Enriched Senior Comp.

18 December 2014
A Long Way Gone Final Paper
In the memoir, “A Long Way Gone,” the author, Ishmael Beah, reflects on many very detailed war scenes that he experienced during the time of Sierra Leone’s civil war. Many of these scenes are heartless and possess things that you think no man could ever possibly live with himself after acting upon. Examples of things Beah saw and described are rivers of blood rushing through burned villages that were once very live and happy, brains and intestines laying in the open outside of bodies of where they once belonged, and corpses charcoaled and burnt to where you could not hardly recognize that it was at one time a human being. Scenes like this can change

I used to only think of people fighting for their country like it was a glorious thing to do. You were always given the title, “hero,” by loved ones of a community and people throughout your home nation. By being such a public figure, i assumed that it was a wonderful thing to part in. Little did I ever actually stop and think of was really happening when people were being sent overseas to fight. I believe that this is what Beah was trying to portray to us in his memoir. He wanted us to not only fully understand what war was all about, but also understand the personal side effects it set on all the soldiers. The physical, the emotional, and the mental side effects that many of us do not take into consideration. Beah wants to show us that war can totally change a man’s foundation. It can twist your views and your rule of judgement; things you never would once ever think of doing now seem okay because of all the repercussions of war. To give you a better understanding of what i mean, after being forced into military combat and put on many different drugs, Ishmael takes place in a throat

For example, after being captured by the rebel group, Ishmael is forced to almost kill his brother for his initiation. Although he was fortunate enough to escape that tragedy, Beah was still later separated from his brother, Junior, and never saw him again. It’s things like this can can destroy a man’s character, and once that character is finally destroyed, that’s when you are most vulnerable. You dont know who you are anymore and you must take on a new face and persona. This is how I believe Ishmael fell so quickly to the acts of war. It was almost like a domino effect. First he started off seeing the violence of war on an everyday basis, then he was put on drugs to help brainwash him, and to finally crack him, he got separated from his brother. A quote that I believe shows Ishmaels character got destroyed is this, “Sometimes we were asked to leave for war in the middle of a movie. We would come back hours later after killing many people and continue the movie as if we had just returned from intermission.” (124).. Once Ishmael lost who he was, there only thing he had around to shape who is was going to become were drugs, killing, and war