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Analysis Of A Long Way Gone By Ishmael Beah

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Most people live a relatively normal day to day life even if we may have our share of mundane problems. If we are asked to describe our emotions, at the very least we can say happy or sad or fine. When we truly love something or take great pleasure in something, most of us tend to wax poetically. In contrast, there are people like Ishmael Beah whose lives started off quite normal but then it took a major wrong turn. From the tender age of ten years, Beah witnessed the horrors of war in his home country, Sierra Leone. When he was twelve, Beah was separated from his family when the rebels attacked his village. Beah’s journey to escape the rebel forces led him through areas where he witnessed the horrors of war and it led him to war as a child soldier. Life as a child soldier left a deep impact on Ishmael Beah. Although, he recovered physically and mentally as children often do, Beah’s writing shows his difficulty in expressing his emotions. Throughout his memoirs, A Long Way Gone, Beah writes about the events of his life in a very factual tone. As he relates the events of his …show more content…

The influence of war on his inner turmoil is exhibited when he encounters the wounded family in the van. This was his first real exposure to the casualties of war. He personifies the ground he stood on. He writes that he felt the ground moving beneath his feet (13). Beah feels as if he no longer stands on solid ground because the world he firmly knew has shifted, leaving him dazed and confused. Similarly, when trying to stay ahead of the rebel forces, Beah again turns to nature to express his inner turmoil and emotional upheaval. He writes how the moon followed them and would wait for them “at the other end of dark forests paths”, however, as more nights passed the moon lost its luster (80). This indicates how hopeless Beah felt. The vivid personifications are indicators of the depth of Beah’s

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The biography, A Long Way Gone, Memoirs of a boy Soldier, by Ishmael Beah, tells the story of a thirteen year old boy who spends his childhood being compelled to fight in the civil war in Sierra Leone. Ishmael Beah tries to avoid fighting for the rebels by running from town to town with his friends as the rebels advanced. Finally, his luck runs out and Ishmael Baeh is forced to serve in the civil war for the rebels. The story goes on to describe his horrific childhood as a soldier in Sierra Leone and his eventual rescue by Unicef and rehabilitation center. In this passage, Ishmael Beah created a mental image that allows us to visualize how disturbing and how unreal living in wartone Sierra Leone during the early 1980’s.

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Forced to flee from rebel forces, Beah becomes separated from his family and embarks on a journey filled with violence, fear, and loss. He is eventually recruited as a child soldier by the government army, where he is trained to fight and becomes brainwashed to the horrors of war. As Beah recounts his time as a child soldier, he describes the brutal realities of combat and the mental toll it takes on him and other soldiers. The book shows

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A Long Way Gone is memoir that was written by a young soldier by the name of Ishmael Beah who was forced into the war raging army for the sake of his protection and survival. Ishmael’s story is full of traumatizing experiences and the violent conflicts that occur in being a child solider. His home village, Sierra Leone, was attached by a rampant group of rebels who were devoted in destroying and killing everything and everyone one in its path. During the time of the attack, Ishmael, his brother, and friends began to wonder off to different villages as a way to escape the rebel’s wrath. Maneuvering from village to village required the group of boys to endure the struggles of finding food, shelter, and safety.

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War is destructive and tears apart the most important parts of life. Ishmael Beah was a boy in Sierra Leone when a civil war was taking place Ishmael wrote a book about his experiences titled A Long Way Gone. The book is about how Ishmael went from a boy to a soldier. Ishmael lived happily in a village when it was attacked by the rebels RUF he fled from village to village. Ishmael eventually ended up by the Army and joined them to fight the rebels.

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It is often said that one’s early years of upbringing in his or her family can shape the rest of that person’s life drastically. More often than not, people’s caretakers immensely influence and shape their beliefs, thoughts, and morals. Sometimes this can lead to issues such as a child growing up in an abusive household and then abusing his or her own family later on. In Ishmael Beah’s book, A Long Way Gone (2007), he tells the story of his childhood life during a war. In the early 1990’s, a civil war broke out in Sierra Leone.

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Day by day, children are facing acts of inhumanity that are occurring around the world. This causes these kids to become different people who change in negative ways. Such acts are being mentioned in the books Never Fall Down by Patricia McCormick and A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah. Never Fall Down is about a boy named Arn who survives the Cambodian genocide, and A Long Way Gone is about the author’s experience as a child soldier fighting in the Sierra Leone Civil War for three years.

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Not experiencing war is a luxury many people unfortunately do not get; however, Ishmael Beah, the author of A Long Way Gone, lives and survives the war, though not without heartache. With war there is always fear, death, and hell. Ishmael Beah proves war is hell through the killing of civilians, the distrust, and the after effects of the war. Ishmael proves war is hell through the killing of civilians. Many innocent bystanders of the war are forced out of their homes, made to run for their lives.

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Ishmael is unique because he is both the inflictor and victim. Throughout his “service” as a child soldier underneath the Government’s army, Ishmael was repeatedly drugged and manipulated. These alterations included the glorification of war movies and the consumption of destructive substances (Beah ). Ishmael had never been this way before; he was once just an ordinary Sierra Leonean boy. In the time before he became a soldier, Ishmael talks about the distrust people felt towards each other.

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Ever heard of the phrase “Actions speak louder than words”? Quite frankly, that phrase has helped me make heaps of clever decisions throughout my life. But I’ve come to learn that sometimes, a phrase can’t always be utilized so proficiently. If I were to be genuinely honest, words can affect lives just as greatly as actions can. Ishmael Beah, the author of A Long Way Gone, experienced dreadful occurrences countless times throughout his childhood all the way to his early adulthood.

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“When you tell a story, you give it out to the world and whoever listens becomes a part of that story.” Ishmael Beah, raised a war child and now a published author, is very aware of the impact that words can have. Beah published his memoir in 2007, and with it relays the power of stories to influence people. Thus, stories are significant in A Long Way Gone, as they are used to symbolize hope, introduce a new perspective for the reader, and reflect the memoir’s themes. Throughout Beah’s life as a refugee and war child, stories became an anchor for him.

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(Conclusion) Ishmael Beah narrated his personal experience from an honest point of view. By doing so, he enabled the reader to understand everything he chose to explain head on, with no barriers. The reader was able to know what Beah went through, in his own words. “I began to cry quietly and all of a sudden felt dizzy,” (Beah 34). The readers were able to understand how he felt in certain situations.

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Also, the war had an immediate effect on his friends in various ways. The community was also impacted by the events that took place. Often, war is caused by disputes between various countries, and is fought for a greater good; however, many citizens suffer the consequences. For Ishmael Beah, a thirteen-year-old, life was very troublesome.

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“I fainted from a migraine while I was sitting on the verandah. I woke up in bed in the hospital.” This is what the character, Ishmael Beah has to face in the story A Long Way Gone. A Long Way Gone is a true story of a individual named Ishmael Beah, who becomes an unwilling soldier during a civil war in Sierra Leone. The writer Ishmael Beah develops the theme of indomitable spirit through the use of tone with dialogue throughout the forest, imagery through the visions, and symbolism through his education.

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When the terrors of war abruptly entered Ishmael’s life, Ishmael was only a young boy, leaving him with little wisdom and vulnerable to influence. Left alongside his brother, Junior Beah, and friends, Ishmael is forced to become his own man. This amount of pressure from such harsh decision making wore away the happy young boy he once was. Ishmael eventually became addicted to drugs, something that only made his scars more visible and his functionality

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The major theme in the story A Long Way Gone is that with family and love a person can make it through anything. Overall Ishmael’s story is a very powerful, eye opening read; it informs people on a subject that some know little to nothing about, the civil war in Sierra Leone. Beah uses the theme of family and love, along with the use of symbolism and other literary devices, to inform a larger audience of the issues that he and others had to face while trying to survive in a war zone. A Long Way Gone, an autobiographical memoir, written by Ishmael Beah, takes place in Sierra Leone during the time of their civil war.

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