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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.
When he finally gets out and is with at least someone he is blood related to, then his uncle ends up dying and he runs away to try and get to America. A Long way Gone follows the pattern of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, The Hero’s Journey. The Hero’s Journey of Ishmael Beah in A Long Way Gone starts off with the separation stage of the journey. This stage is about the separation of the hero from the normal world.
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.
A Long Way Gone is an autobiography written by Ishmael Beah, the book details his childhood throughout the Sierra Leon civil war. The book shows how you can turn an innocent child into a killing machine. We see both sides of the warring party do this with them drugging the children, turning them against the enemy with propaganda and threatening them with death. These are the factors that made a quarter of all the soldiers within this war under the age of eighteen.
Furthermore, Beah has struggled with losing his family and is brain washed that he starts to lose his humanity. To clarify, when the rebels were planning an attack on a village Beah releases his anger on the rebels by shooting as many rebels from the other village as he can. “Whenever I looked at rebels during raids, I got angrier, because they looked like the rebels who played cards in the ruins of the village where I had lost my family. So when the lieutenant gave orders, I shot as many as I could, but I didn't feel any better”(122). In this moment, the pain that Beah has from losing his family turns into hatred for the rebels that killed his loved ones and Beah believes that killing more
Ishmael Beah, author of A Long Way Gone, summarizes his experiences as a child soldier. He supports this by using descriptive word choice, which creates this mostly dark tone throughout the book. His purpose was to assert that being involved with the war as a child was difficult, and that children can lose their innocence from the war, in order to get the readers to see the war from a child’s point of view. He establishes a that dark tone with his readers of the book, with people of all ages.
In his novel, he describes the harrowing conditions he had to endure during the Sierra Leone War. In "The Long Way Gone," he exudes how childhood wartime experiences affected his life negatively. Childhood wartime experiences tormented Ishmael Beah through flashbacks. It would remind him of afflicting memories of the war. According to the author,
One of the most famous male child soldiers was Ishmael Beah who fought in the civil war in Sierra Leone. Ishmael Beah later wrote a novel titled A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier in 2007. In this novel, Beah describes his personal experiences in a nonconventional military unit and its affects it had physically and mentally. The grave detail of the novel enables the readers to fully understand the seriousness of this phenomenon. Beah experienced many life changing events in his life beginning at the age of twelve.
As an innocent child, Beah, nor did any of the children in Sierra Leone, did not have any idea that the majority of them would become child soldiers. They would not only be touched by war, but they would be at the epicenter of the war, fighting on the front lines while raping and pillaging villages. Beah and his older brother, Junior, along with another friend left their village to walk to a neighboring one to rap together at a talent show. Not long after they arrived in Mattru Jong, they received news from their friends that their home village has been attacked by rebels, marking the start of war in Sierra Leone.
He is an ocean away from Sierra Leone, but every aspect of his life is affected by what he went through in his youth. His memories from before the war influence the way he sees the world: “Whenever I get a chance to observe the moon now, I still see those same images I saw when I was six, and it pleases me to know that that part of my childhood is still embedded in me” (17). The memories from Beah’s early childhood may be overshadowed by his more traumatic ones, but they are
The Sierra Leonean Civil War had a very negative effect on Beah. Ishmael Beah lost his brother, his mother, his father, his friends, his uncle, his belongings, and his mentality. This theme is important because it shows the consequences of war. It changed who Beah was. Before the war, Beah was an ordinary African school boy who after school played with his little brother, Junior.
The way Beah explained what happened to him, he did it in a sad way. My response to the writer is that I feel sorry for him. I cannot relate to him in any way since I have never been exposed to war and even been a soldier fighting in it. He was strong through the hardest part of his life; the actual war itself, rehabilitation, and ultimately escaping Freetown, Sierra Leone to eventually fly over to New York and start a new life. Ishmael Beah’s memoir, A Long Way Gone, replays a part of Beah’s life that will always be very vivid to him.
The memoir “A Long Way Gone” describes multiple incidents that show that war takes away innocence. Ishmael was thirteen when he joined the war. Beah admits, “My childhood had gone by without my knowing, and it seems as if my heart frozen.” (Chapter 15, page 126) During a period of violence, a child cannot be a child.
When Beah was at the conferences far away from war, he felt like his life finally had meaning again. Beah’s “A Long Way Gone” tells an important story of unwilling boy soldier, Ishmael Beah during a civil war in Sierra Leone. He finally becomes the person he feared, a killing machine capable of cruel and horrible things. This is an important book because during the tough times of the civil war Ishmael was taken to a rehabilitation center where he did struggle to understand his past or even imagine a future.
Ishmael Beah was mentally scarred for life because he fought in a war as a child. According to the article, “Biafran civil war and its effects on a particular sect of people who have been tremendously affected by the war, the child soldiers. One of the most fascinating things about war narratives is the transgenerational power of trauma across generations and how the writers, even after many years of the war, still ponder over the subject of trauma related to the war when historical anecdotes interest the world with factual details alone.” (“Child Soldier Trauma”)
