Analysis Of A Long Way Gone By Ishmael Beah

A long way gone by Ishmael Beah, attempts to evoke a powerful response from the leader, by using vivid descriptions to show how he has become emotionally traumatized by the acts of violence in the war. The reader then sympathizes with Ishmael and begins to understand the lasting and deep, emotional pain that Ishmael deals with on a daily basis.

Ishmael Beah is the protagonist in A Long Way Gone who was forced out of his village due to a war that broke out in his country. He had to hide in the woods and run from village to village seeking food and protection. Surviving the war seemed nearly impossible and throughout his journey saw soldiers do terrible things to innocent people that left him traumatized. Eventually he too was forced into becoming a solider and his life depended on killing; “kill or get killed” (Beah 126).

Bang! Bang! “At that instant several gunshots, which sounded like thunder striking the tin-roofed houses, took over town. The sound of guns was so terrifying it confused everyone” (Beah 23). In A Long Way Gone, Ishmael Beah conveys his amazing journey through war and hardship as a child soldier. Sierra Leone--a country on the western coast of Africa--was embroiled in a bloody civil war in the 1990’s. Battles multiplied as bloodshed abounded and as a child in Sierra Leone Ishmael Beah was forced to survive, find food, and face unimaginable dangers. Running from the battle front was also a routine ordeal. At age 13 Beah was captured by the military and brainwashed into using guns and drugs. As a child soldier he perpetrated and witnessed a great deal of violence. At 15 he was rescued and taken to a rehabilitation center. With time and continual treatment, Beah was able to recover, to some extent, and reconnect with his Uncle Tommy who adopted him. He was later chosen to speak to the United Nations in New York City about his experiences as a child soldier. When he returned to Sierra Leone, war broke out throughout in the city where he lived, causing many deaths including his Uncle Tommy. Eventually Beah escaped Sierra Leone and he managed to reach New York City, where he began a new life. Through Ishmael Beah’s book A Long Way Gone, he conveys a central theme of having to survive, at a young age, through the hardships of war with the use of imagery.

A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah, published by Sarah Crichton Books in New York in 2007, tells the haunting story of Ishmael Beah, a child soldier during the Sierra Leone Civil War. The book begins in January of 1993 in Ishmael’s small village called Mogbwemo, located near Mattru Jong, Sierra Leone. A Long Way Gone addresses a plethora of geographical issues such as refugees and population movements, child exploitation, and most of all: war. Each of these issues directly affects Ishmael, the autobiographer. In his book of memoirs, A Long Way Gone, Beah uses his horrendous experiences as a young teenager thrown into the dead heat of civil war to effectively argue that children have a right to their own childhoods, and that children deserve to have their innocence remain in place until they are older, not have it be stolen by the terror of war. His potent encounters and experiences also highlight successfully the undeniable effects that geographical problems are causing not just in Sierra Leone, but across the entire African continent.

Ishmael Beah tells of the events of his youth and untimely loss of his childhood in his book A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. In this heart wrenching recollection of his childhood, Ishmael tells of how the war in Sierra Leone changed his life and took him from the life he led as a child growing up with his family, hobbies, love of music and mischief, and left him a wandering orphan and later, a brutal soldier who’s daily activities consisted of killing, burning and thievery. Surviving the fate that befell him required resorting to tactics that skewed the basis of reality. The basis of Beah’s existence was sustained on the fact that he and the other soldiers around him maintained a daily struggle of tug of war between their traumatized

Recently, everyone has begun to wonder the same thing: why are so many leaders so… corrupt? Why do they care only about a miniscule group of people, throwing aside morals altogether? The feeling of power creates a superiority complex, letting power go to a leader’s head and giving them the desire and means to execute terrible things. This is a problem because many people in our world acquire their power because others believe they can improve the world. Once power takes control, they become corrupt. It is essential for the public to understand this because otherwise, people in power will gain this complex.

In order for the military to use these children as killing machines they had to use several tactics to emotionally manipulate these boys into killers. In A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah he states the following “In the daytime instead of playing soccer in the village square, I took turns at the guarding posts around the village, smoking marijuana and sniffing brown brown, cocaine mixed with gunpowder, which always spread out on the table and of course taking more of the white capsules, as I had become addicted to them” (120). Basically the tactics the soldiers used to indoctrinate child soldiers were drugs, violent movies, and teach them to seek vengeance for their family’s death. These tactics would rob the innocence of many kids and their childhoods.

There are approximately 250,000 child soldiers in the world today. Sixty percent of these soldiers are young boys, and eighty percent of them are under the age of fifteen. In the memoir, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, Ishmael Beah describes his three-year experience as a child soldier in Sierra Leone. Throughout the five phases of the novel Ishmael 's personality changes drastically. It is more of an evolution than it is development. In the end, he ends up as an entirely different person than he began as. Throughout the book, Ishmael faces many challenges. In the beginning, he copes with the trauma of losing his family. Later, he struggles with his addiction to cocaine. In the end, he 's learning how to adjust to a normal life. These significant moments shape his character, and explain why he acts the way that he does.

The ground is hot and damp. Humidity hangs in the air. Blood runs through the rivers, and bullet casings line the ground like stones on a path. Bodies pile up faster than the plants can decompose them. Sierra Leone’s war-torn country has seen a lot since its independence in 1961, including an end to democracy, three military coups, a one-party state, and a civil war. The civil war affected many families, like Ishmael Beah’s. Beah is the author of A Long Way Gone, a book about a boy soldier who is saved from the horrors of the civil war in Sierra Leone. The war (and other factors) affected Beah’s personality throughout the story, and the way his life would change. Once he becomes a soldier, his personality changes very much. Also, when Beah

The sacrifices we make today determines what we highly value in our life. Our willingness to sacrifice directly amplifies how desperate we are to achieve the outcome we desire. In the memoir A Long Way Gone, Ishmael Beah deliberately sacrifices his sole humanity in order to survive from the rebels. In other words, Ishmael suppresses his true emotions in order to remain alive. Thus, this explains why Ishmael joined the army and became a living killing machine.

When running away from his home, Ishmael’s value of trust and survival became more relevant. Ishmael starts travelling with a group of boys, including his brother, to flee his town. In every village they passed through, trust was not given to them by those townspeople. Most of the villages assumed that they were rebels. Everyone is now afraid of each other because of the circumstances they are enduring. Trust is lost between Sierra Leoneans - Ishmael issues that the essence of human understanding is lost because people are too afraid of each other. As Ishmael travels with his friends from village to village, people often eye them with a sense of fear. Male children have lost their innocence as they become trained to kill. With their journey,

In “A Long Way Gone” by Ishmael Beah, Beah displays his experience of this harsh reality of PTSD in child soldiers through his personal experiences in the 1980’s-1990’s in Sierra Leone.

As a mother of a high school student, I feel as though it is a brilliant idea to let Mr. Ishmael Beah speak to the students. The fellow peers of your school need to value how lucky they are to be in such a sheltered atmosphere. Sensing the indisputable emotions of Mr. Beah telling his story of being a boy soldier is a lesson that should not be passed up. Understanding how atrocious it must have been to fight in a war solely based on supremacy and riches would help these teenagers understand what strength and determination really is.

In the novel, “A long way gone” by Ishmael Beah, Beah is overwhelmed with the situation in Sierra Leone that he has been forced into. Beah looks at the world as if they are both at war with one in other, in Beah’s mind everyone and everything is trying to kill him. For example, Beah and a couple others are attending a church service, when the rebel forces come into the town and try to kill everyone. Beah and his friends flee into nearby bushes, but the “imam” (pastor) continues to pray. The rebel’s take the imam to Town Square, “tied him to an iron post, and set fire to his body. They didn’t burn him completely, but the fire killed him”(pg 44). This tragedy, most likely made Beah question his religion, because how could God stand by and let

“Any child soldier has to go through a lot of love, care and understanding to become normal” (Emmanuel Jal). “A Long Way Gone” was written by Ishmael Beah and published in 2007. This novel is about a boy named Ishmael Beah and he enjoyed rap music the minute he hear it and it got him out of many situations. He lost his family and was alone running from rebel soldiers. The army eventually recruited him and some of friends he found while he was running. UNICEF (a rehabilitation center) picked up the boys and brought them back to the state of mind they had before the guns, death, and drugs. The three most important scenes in this story include when Ishmael Beah saw the women running into the village with a dead baby on her back, When he burned the bottom parts of his foot walking on sand, and how acted when he first arrived at the rehabilitation center.