Violence In A Long Way Gone

Violence consists of savagery, sadism, and power. Victims of violence are usually not liberated from the effect it has on them. In ‘A Long Way Gone’ by Ishmael Beah, he elaborates on his personal effects of violence in which he endures and taken part in. Throughout the book, he suffers the consequences of being part of the Sierra Leone Civil War. Ishmael experiences war flashbacks, nightmares, lost of innocence and a normal life in the result of violence.

War is a traumatic experience that affected the boy soldier even after he left the war. The violence caused intense reactions in which Ishmael suffered nightmares; “But at night some of us would wake up from nightmares, sweating, screaming and punching our own heads to drive out the images that torment us even when we were no longer asleep.” (Chapter 15, page 148). This taught me that the brutal slaughtering of people will always linger in the person's mind. It triggers them in

In the beginning of the boy's rehabilitation, they caused chaos. Ishmael wrote, “It hadn't crossed their mind that a change in environment wouldn't immediately make us normal boys; we were dangerous and brainwashed to kill.” (Chapter 15, page 135) They became accustomed to committing horrific killings so when they were taking out of the war they did what they been doing for the duration of it.

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. They have to worry about surviving. Boy soldiers live by the rule of “kill or be killed”. Without a childhood, they lack the basic understandings needed for a normal