A Short Story Of Beah's A Long Way Gone

There are many insightful and enlightening parables in this novel. Most of them are very good

A crowd of young rebellious men, loud voices shouting for freedom, shells, bombs, grenades, blood, and death; this is where my story started from. There are many changes that can happen in a person’s life. Some changes are very tiny and would not affect your life very much. However, other events could be very important and could change a person’s whole life, such as mine. These big events can cause a change in our lifestyle, personality, and the way we look at things. It can also make us realize the value of things that we did not care about before. My life changing event is when I moved with my family to the United States.

Ishmael Beah had a really tough life throughout his childhood and teenage years. In his literary work, A Long Way

In this essay I’m going to be discussing three themes from the novel A Long Way Gone By Ishmael Beah. The three themes I am going to be talking about are survival, family, and war. There are many themes in this novel, but I believe these are the three most important ones. I will explain each theme, give quotes from the book showing the theme and then explain how they are significant and show the theme.

War is and can be defined as both a state of emergency and the liberator to a world so corrupt and unjust. The war in Sierra Leone separated families and ruined lives. How can a fight for a cause so right be so wrong. The Books “The Bite of the Mango” and “A Long Way Gone” compare and contrast Ishmael Beah’s experience to Mariatu Kamaras’. Both books are very different yet very similar. In The Bite of the Mango and A Long Way Gone both characters lose their childhood because of the war, but go through different journeys based solely on their gender.

Ishmael Beah fought a war that was very tense against the rebels which made everyone depressed. Ishmael the author of the book A Long Way Gone was fighting a war against the devilish rebels who change everything in his life. Beah does justify his actions because he wants to get back at the rebels for killing his family. They are justified since his family and friends were killed by the rebels, he basically was forced into becoming a child soldier to fight the rebels from destroying and killing and he witnessed his own village being destroyed.

I do believe pure evil exists, some people were born to be evil. Most times it isn’t the evil persons fault, it is what they are used to and what they have been taught their whole life. In the memoir A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah pure evil does exist. The infamous rebels murder little kids and rape women and they don’t see anything wrong with it. It is their job. The rebels are taught to be evil people. “The rebels were still in my village, angrily cursing and shooting their guns. At some point they pretended to be gone, and someone escaped and went back to the village. They captured him and I could hear them beating him. A few minutes later, gunshots were heard, followed by thick smoke that rose toward the sky. The forest was lit up by the fire that was set in the village” (Beah 35).

Every person in the world goes through some life changing events, whether they are small or big. These changes shape a person's personality. Many life changing events are explained in Ishmael Beah’s book, A Long Way Gone. In the book he goes through many changes throughout his childhood. The story starts during a time in Sierra Leone where rebels are causing terror supposedly trying to make the government “better”. When really they seem to be causing more chaos than help. Ishmael Beah goes through some very life changing events throughout his journey, he manages to get out of these changes but they only seem to make his life worse. Losing the people that mattered most in his life, getting enlisted into the army, and becoming a part of a new

Have you ever imagined what it would be like to be in the center of a war as an adolescent or how the people who experienced war feel after it all ends? Well, Ishmael Beah is an activist and writer, but also was a child soldier in a war in Sierra Leone. He didn't have a choice other than to join the army if he wanted to survive. Due to the war in Sierra Leone, Beah faced many hardships that impacted his life in a negative way.

Starting a calm day in Sierra Leone to surviving, and being trafficked into the army is what Ishmael Beah experiences as a child. A Long Way Gone is a memoir of a child soldier, Ishmael Beah, and the memoir shows the experiences he has throughout his childhood. Beah experiences trauma of the war just like all of the other child soldiers. Ishmael is one of the very little amount that survive the war. The three main themes in A Long Way Gone are the themes of survival, healing, and memory.

Summary The novel, A Long Way Gone, written by Ishmael Beah, tells the story of a African boy point of view during the civil war in Sierra Leone. The young boy goes through a rigorous lifestyle that will forever changed him, and with the relationship he accumulate with his older brother and two friends, they go on an adventure to survive by eluding the deadly rebels, or so they thought. Characters Ishmael: Leaves his family when the rebel attacks his hometown; Mogbwemo. He sees the horrific casualties of people trying to escape, realizing that returning was not an option and having to accept the fact that they’re families are gone.

Ishmael Beah was a child of war in Sierra Leone. His memoir retells his experiences being in the Sierra Leone army. At just twelve years old, Ishmael Beah’s homeland was infested with Foday Sankoh’s brutal army, who would stop at nothing to take control of Sierra Leone’s diamond mines. Beah then comes to explain his experience as a soldier and his killing spree. Although some may argue that his experiences are too graphic, William Boyd hints that readers should read Beah’s memoir.

In the book A Long Way Gone, Ishmael Beah writes down a few stories he heard from his grandmother or from his friend Musa. One tale he tells us about is the “wild pigs”(p.53). In this tale, there is a hunter who hunts wild pigs. The hunter has magic and would turn himself into a boar. He would trick and lead the herd of wild boars to the forest.

In the memoir A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah the main idea is the loss of innocence and if it is possible to regain a part of that innocence. A synopsis of A Long Way Gone is that while Ishmael and his friends were out traveling as a part of a rap group their village was attacked by rebels. Once they flee their village they travel, together, from village to village fighting for survival. After wandering for a year Ishmael gets recruited into the war, on the side of the army to commit atrocious acts that he would never have dreamed of committing less than a year ago. Within a short amount of time in the army Ishmael was so corrupted by the systematic brainwashing and the drugs that killing became “as easy as drinking water.”

The book I have really enjoyed reading in the past year is “A Long Way Gone” by Ishmael Beah which is a story that has been making me want to not only read more, but also dig deeper into the subject. This amazing memoir was written in a first person perspective of being a soldier as a boy in the war of Sierra Leone. Ishmael’s writing style draws my attention because of its order of the story, emotional appeals and imagery.