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Ishmael's Changes In A Long Way Gone

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Within Ishmael Beah’s book A Long Way Gone we see the sierra leone civil war take over and consume a young boy’s life. During Ishmael’s life his settings change rapidly because of the war, this causes him to change with his surroundings. Throughout the book the 3 reoccurring themes has to be family, death and food. These three core topics stay the same yet, as Ishmael’s response changes we see how deeply the war is affecting him. As we make our final round back to the beginning, to see the young boy Ishmael was once again. Right before the war finally hits Beah’s village we see some refugees come into the village, trying the wreckage of the war. This is where Ishmael’s first opinion on war formulates, or at least shown. “At times I thought …show more content…

His group ends up running into the rebels once more, in this settlement we see them lining people up, not particularly violent yet, but Ishmael already reports “struggling to avoid fainting.” We see this stemming off his baseline reaction, but we see this change since the recruitment of children was very common at that point especially for teenage boys. This is a posing threat for Ishmael and his crew, which is why they must keep moving. This pressure caused Ishmael to have violent, self harm thoughts such as when he “looked at the blades of the machetes and thought about how much it would hurt to be chopped into one.” This is when violence is first seen as non horrific and as a passing thought. This is the first time we see the baseline reaction start to change, into what it …show more content…

This desensitization is seen when Beah describes “cleaning the blood off our guns”, this is a very basic and casual scene for what it actually is. Especially coming from a child who had said they struggled not fainting at the sheer sight of the rebels. Beah sees violence as necessity and something to be proud of. The pride itself is seen first when Beah remarks that “i killed the owner of this gun in our last raid.” He now takes pride within violence, it is all he knows as his talent. Beah starts looking forward to violence and wishes to take part. This is a large jump from his baseline reaction, which was puking at the this eagerness to kill causes his primary reaction is resorting to violence, which we see happening at the

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Ishmael became a victim of the war the moment he became a boy soldier. He was only a young teen at the time, where substances took over his life, as he states, “In the daytime, instead of playing soccer in the village square,

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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.

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Many people died during this tragic war. People want to escape the dangerous situation that war presents. Ishmael experiences the loss of friends and family, he is forced to ingest drugs including cocaine. Ishmael kills many innocent children and adults in the towns he invades. Ishmael is a victim on the fact that he was

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As a result, they went out to fight and were not fazed by the killing of other human beings. He feels as he is invincible and not capable of death and suddenly is no longer afraid of the idea of dying. The drugs made him angry undemandingly, so he went out to fight and did his utmost to settle the army leaders. These drugs basically numb them to the violent acts they are about to pursue to make them

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I am not a soldier anymore; I am a child. We are all brothers and sisters. What I have learned from my experiences is that revenge is not good” (Beah 199). This supports my claim because not only is Ishmael able to openly talk about his trauma from war, he is able to acknowledge how it has taught him many valuable lessons.

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A Long Way Gone is a memoir of a boy soldier in Sierra Leone, who struggles to keep his humanity. Ishmael Beah, the author, achieved success once he went off to speak at the United Nations conference and when he realized that he could not go back to the war. Beah achieved success when he went off to New York and spoke at the United Nations conference. As Beah sat around the conference listening to all the other children that represented their country, Beah sat proudly “behind the Sierra Leone name plaque..

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This is by drugs and brainwashing from his superiors, but also by missing his family and wanting revenge. Beah went into the army with bad intentions but found the truth in retrospect saying, “I joined the army to avenge the deaths of my family and to survive, but I've come to learn that if I am going to take revenge, in that process I will kill another person whose family will want revenge; then revenge and revenge and revenge will never come to an end...”(Beah 199). Beah loves his family so much that he will kill to avenge them. His love of family, even if this is not morally right, makes him want to stay alive and kill everyone that is relatively related to the deaths of his family. Even though killing people isn't the best way to go about revenge, it shows how far

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Ishmael is at the rehabilitation center with other boys who were in the war. He discovers some of the boys are fighting for the rebels side, and with partisan views, a huge fight starts. The boys are throwing punches and stabbing each other. Ishmael began kicking a boy that went after him, and then Alhaji stabs him in the back. They both “...continued kicking the boy until he stopped moving”.

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Another event that was probably his final turn before deciding to become a violent child soldier. In chapter 11, Ishmael has just lost his family and blames Gasemu and tries to kill him, “walked behind Gasemu and locked his neck under my arm. I squeezed him as hard as I could” (Beah 96). this quote demonstrates how Ishmael is willing to kill now for revenge as the quote did not show any hesitation from Ishmael. As shown in the article Child soldiers battle traumas in Congo rehab, it reads, “the children, they go back to their villages and they tell other children carrying a gun is not the way” (Nima).

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The war to Ishmael was simply an issue extraneous to him and far away from his home. He sees people coming from his village were escaping from the rebels leaves his home village, Mataru Jang and for the first time, he gets a shock from a man covered with his son’s blood and a woman who carrying her dead baby on her back. He does not know if his family is alive or dead. He was a boy who never had been through the unexpected situation without learning how to weather the situation. All he could do was “listen[ing] to rap music, trying to memorize the lyrics” (Beah 15) to avoid thinking about the situation at hand.

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When the war unleashed in Sierra Leone, Beah and his friends have a difficult time finding villages with a food supply, and find themselves without money, so they decide to head back home in search of any money they had left hidden back home. The boys barely survived getting out of their village, only to find that no one in Mattru Jong was willing to sell their food, because they were saving it for themselves. This angered Beah for his time lost traveling back to his home village and risking his life for nothing, ultimately. Moreover, in that moment Beah realized that he had nothing left to do practice the survival tactics that everyone else was taking part in: “ Things changes rapidly in a matter of seconds and no one had nay control over anything. We had yet to learn these things and implement survival tactics, which was what it came down to.

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Later, UNICEF came and decided to take Ishmael out of the war and put him in a rehabilitation center. In this part of the novel, the reader can see how his desire for killing has controlled him completely. By fighting and killing rebel members in the rehabilitation center and beating up the guards to force them into doing what the children wants to do, the reader can see that the war has changed their ways of life and thoughts. The army was able to change Ishmael 's desires and from that, he became a deadly

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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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(1991-2002) Ishmael’s story solely focused on the years he was affected by the war. (1992-1997) The tale begins when with Beah, his brother, and a couple of his friends, heading to another village to put on a performance and while away, they catch wind that their village had been attacked by the RUF (Revolutionary United Front). The boys' having no home to go back to, wander from village to village looking for shelter and safety.

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