A Long Way Gone Comparison

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” wrote Martin Luther King Jr. in his letter from Birmingham Jail. Ishmael Beah, author of the book A Long Way Gone speaks from experience. He was plagued with a war in his home country, taking away his childhood and family. This injustice caused him to have to fight in the war and resort to drugs to take away his mental and physical pain. Similarly, in One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams-Garcia, Delphine and her sisters struggle with the injustice that is not knowing their mother at the ages of eleven, nine, and seven, and the injustice of being black during a time period when people are segregated because of their color. Their father hesitantly flies them across the United States to see their mother that they haven’t met before, and who has secrets of her own. In both books, the children are forced to grow up faster than they should and take care of themselves and others, and since they are children it is more difficult to deal with the situations that are hard even for a grown person. When a person is forced to start a new life because of an injustice, they are going to be nervous; but over time when they meet people, they will gain confidence to speak out.

“Maybe there is a beast… maybe it’s only us.” A group of British boys, ranging from six to twelve years old, become stranded from their plane crash on an uncharted island after being evacuated presumably from the shadows of WWII with no adult supervision. At first, the boys are inflamed with the gobs of freedom they are given but some swiftly realize that it’s the worst possible thing to happen. The way of the wild consumes some of the boys past the point of no return and unchangable “mistakes” are made. Eventually, they are rescued from the island but perhaps not from their behavior. In the novel Lord of the Flies, William Golding uses personification, diction, foreshadowing, and imagery to convey that savage tendencies in all of us tend

In the story “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding, he shows how the boys lost all innocence and civilization. The boys went from having innocent child minds to taking lives of other people, acting savage, and losing all civilization due to problems on the island. The boys had forgotten where they came from and became savage in order to survive; it was the need of survival that caused the loss of innocence among the boys.

William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is an extremely popular book to all ages. This novel takes place in a nuclear war in an unspecified place. Some of these characters have normal personalities and home life situations, but others definitely do not. In the beginning of the novel, most of the boys are normal but getting stranded on a deserted island can really change a person, emotionally and mentally. An example of them being changed is, towards the end of the book, when they start getting crazy they all eat Simon and start to kill one another off of starvation. In this novel, it is pretty obvious that a person really can not trust anyone under these circumstances. Thus, there is a savage in all humans.Throughout

Although there are many tones in the book, there is an emphasise on the loss of humanity. The war caused people to lose everything that they once had.. Losing everything caused them to have a wary approach on anything that came into view. . “Someone had started a rumor of the seven boys…” (Beah 57). The people in the villages were scared of outsiders because of the pain they have caused. No one knew who to trust anymore. Beah used great tones to show how the people felt and while reading the book one can sort of imagine how the boys felt knowing this. In the book the author writes about how he approached a family swimming in the river. They were having fun and and trying to be normal and escape the horrors. Beah walked up to them and, “...all of them

Throughout the memoir there are many cases of death, some because of health reasons and others for intentional reasons. Through family, anger, and survival of the fittest, Beah makes being responsible for someone else’s death known. After Beah’s long, treacherous journey and being separated from his family, he eventually had the chance to be reunited with his family. “The path zigzagged up to the top, where when we finally made it, everyone had to rest for a few minutes. I became angry that we had to rest, and I sat on a big rock away from the rest of the group” (93). Beah, eager to see his family could no longer wait, progressed to the village only to hear the sounds of villagers shrieking and see the village burn to ashes. The casualties in the village were caused by the rebels. The rebels were aware of their doings and knew what they did was wrong, but they did not seem to care. Although they were following orders, they were still responsible for the passing of every person there. After Beah loses his family he becomes angry with Gasemu and brutally attacks him and blames him for the death of his family. “If we hadn’t stopped to rest on that hill, if we hadn’t run into Gasemu, I would have seen my family, I thought… I got up, walked behind Gasemu, and locked his neck under my arms… I fell next to a pestle. I picked it up and hit Gasemu with it” (95-96). Along with a bloody nose, Gasemu had been shot by one of the rebels and later died. “When we finally got to the wahlee, Gasemu’s eyes were still open. Alhaji closed them. I sat by him. His blood was on my palm and my wrist. I regretted hitting him with the pestle” (99). Although Ishmael was not the one who caused Gasemu to die, he still took responsibility for intentionally hurting him with the pestle and making his nose bleed. After eluding death a numerous amount of times, Ishmael and his friends become soldiers. They began training hard and acting like the other soldiers. The idea of killing any rebel was now locked in

Humans are a sophisticated and advanced race, one which possess the ability to affect their environment, and one another, in significant and often destructive ways. War is a catastrophic event created by humans, who upon creating it neglect to comprehend its far-reaching effects. The novel, Lord of the Flies by William Golding, places a group of prepubescent males into one of these situations. After an evacuation aircraft crash-lands, the boys are left upon a deserted island to manage and fend for themselves. As Golding details the trials and tribulations of the young men on the island, it becomes increasingly apparent that the children respect authority and require an organized leadership. The failure to manifest such a system will result in a de-evolution into savagery.

We all have a story, we all go through tough things in life. We can relate to a lot of things and we find out that were not so different from other people. The memoir A Long Way Gone and the film The Inevitable Defeat of Mister and Pete have a lot of similarities and differences. Even though they live in two different places, they are very similar. One similarity would be that they are both struggling alone. They both have their parents but the boys are going to learn how to survive alone without them. They are two young black boys ages 12 and 13 that live in poverty. They become independent throughout their stories. Another thing that both Ishmael and Mister can relate to is drugs. When Ishmael was brought into the army, he started adapting to the other

The following citation shows that Beah has to watch the rebels not only destroy the village but destroy lives, and families which gives another reason for Beah for his actions he commits. “According to the teachers, the rebels had attacked the mining areas in the afternoon. The sudden outburst of gunfire had caused people to run for their lives in different directions. Fathers had come running from their workplaces, only to stand in front of their empty houses with no indication of where their families had gone. Mothers wept as they ran toward schools, rivers, and water taps to look for their children. Children ran home to look for parents who were wandering the streets in search of them. And as the gunfire intensified,people gave up looking for their loved ones and ran out of town” (Beah 9). This gives the readers a image of what happened when the rebels entered his village and attack them. As the families were going in different ways and people were killed and houses were set on fire this gives another reason for Beah’s actions since he had to watch something that he loved so much and he grew up knowing as home fall apart so

Violence is almost everywhere around the world. It is somewhat unavoidable in life. In the memoir A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah, Ishmael experiences numerous severe and frightful demonstrations of violence in various ways. These cases of violence scar his life for quite a while, however there are some learning focuses that come extremely close to violence. A few things that stem from the effects of Ishmael's fierce encounters are, repulsiveness of memories, posttraumatic stress disorder and a loss of innocence.

Lord of the Flies is a book that takes place during World War II, and is about a group of English school boys who crashed in a plane on an island without any adult survivors. Throughout the story, the boys struggle to keep a mindset based on rescue and survival, and instead think more about hunting and having fun, while avoiding any responsibility. During this, the boys also struggle with fear of a "beastie" - what is the beast? To the author, the beast began as war, then it became the externalized form of the boys' fear, and ended as savagery.

In his memoir, Ishmael said, “I put my hands behind my head and lay on my back, trying to hold on to the memories of my family. Their faces seemed to be far off somewhere in my mind, and to get to them I had to bring up painful memories” (71). As a child who misses their family Beah spends his time thinking about this family and how he wishes he was with them. He at this moment remembers the little things that people do not realize take for granted. He also says, “There were over thirty boys between the ages of seven and sixteen. I was one of them. Apart from this, there was no indications that our childhood was threatened, much less that we

What did A Long Way Gone teach you from a historical perspective? What did Ishmael’s personal history communicate to you about the recent history of his homeland?

“Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything. -Plato” Music is as a light of hope for Ishmael Beah, when he is placed in these life or death situations. Music plays a big role in most of everyone’s lives. Music can cheer you up, it can get you excited, it can calm you down, and in Beah’s eyes it can save your life. I use music in my everyday life to to cope with my stress, and play music that corresponds with my mood. In some parts of our world, music is their culture. As Santana’s song says, let the music set you free. In the book A Long Way Gone, Beah’s music plays a big role in his survival and displays his innocence when he was still a kid.

Surroundings can impact a person’s coming of age by the way things revolve around them and the decisions they have to make in order to survive this world we live in no matter what or how harsh the consequences may be. Ishmael Beah had to have some type of hope with him through all the things he has been through in order to survive it all. Ishmael explains, “When I was very little, my father used to say, “If you are alive, there is hope for a better day and something good to happen. If there is nothing good left in the destiny of a person, he or she will die” I thought about these words during my journey, and they kept me moving even when I didn’t know where I was going” (Beah 54). This demonstrates that Ishmael used the memory of his father