Ishmael Beah Quotes

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.

The purpose of the book A Long Way Gone Memoirs of a Boy Soldier written by Ishmael Beah, is to show the evil behind arming children and having them fight. Beah tells a story of a personal experience of being a child forced to become a soldier, and in his story there are many rhetorical strategies that he uses. Beah uses rhetorical strategies such as Onomatopoeia, Anaphora, and Hyperbole. He uses these strategies to make the story a more sorrowful story and allow the readers to feel a certain type of connection or understanding to him. Ishmael who is suffering from what is going on around his villages goes through many obstacles with his brother and their friends. These strategies make the story more personal because they give out a lot of detail and lets the reader really see the perspective of Ishmael.

A Long Way Gone. Throughout the book he undergoes many changes in life from losing his family and friends to massacring his once neighbors and friendly school mates. Ishmael Beah is both a victim and a victimizer as he flees the ruthless RUF soldiers but, also finds himself craving the front lines of war where he is brainwashed to pillage and demolish the villages of the very civilians he is supposed to protect as a government soldier. While sharing

Does Ishmael Beah justify his actions with the story he tells in the novel A Long Way Gone? Ishmael Beah does not attempt to show that the stories he tells us in the novel are either the right thing or wrong thing to do. Instead, he shows us both side of his life. He doesn't tell us a single story, he shows all aspects of his life. One example of this is how he tells us about being brainwashed by the rebels and believing that his actions were the right thing to do during that time. A second example is about how Ishmael Beah tells us about his time when he was in rehab. One last example is that he shows us that he now has a safe life living with his uncle and cousins in sierra leone

One of these experiences is when he was about to see his family, then the village they were staying in was attacked by rebels. His mother, father and two brothers were trapped in their house and slowly burned to death. This happened only a few weeks after their former home was attacked and raided by rebels. But it is a better fate then some because one of his now deceased, friend’s 3 sisters were raped over and over again. while their father was knocked out for trying to defend them and their mother being forced to watch. The rebels took the girls with them. Ishmael's fate was not much better than the 3 girls for he became a child soldier: traumatized and hopped up on drugs and told to “avenge” his family by killing every rebel and snorting cocaine until he no longer felt anything. Remember war is not all honor and glory, it is suffering, death and pain. In more ways than

There were many quotes that stood out to me in this memoir. But there was one that stood out the most to me, “These days I live in three worlds: my dreams, and the experiences of my new life, which trigger memories from the past” (Beah 20). Ishmael explains that he lives in three different world, his dreams, the life he is experiencing right now, and past memories. He trying live a new life in the United States, but what he did in the past was haunting him. He wants to leave all the things he did in the past, behind him.

Ishmael is initially sicken by the acts of war but as he is continue to see people killed in front of him and fed drugs it became the new normal. Ishmael becomes desensitize about the situation and accepts the challenge. He was told that if he didn’t want to kill he would not be giving rations. “They have lost everything that makes them human,” (108) he was told and killing them would be his chances to help get rid of a great evil. A young child can easily be manipulated into thinking that he is doing the right thing. Everything is knew was destroyed and he now was building a new

Emotionally Ishmael went numb and develops hatred from his trauma during the war. He clearly states that when he wrote to another character in the novel, “He said that his numbness was a terrible thing, he didn’t feel anything except that he looked forward to killing as many Japs as possible, he was angry at them and wanted their deaths − all of them, he wrote; he felt hatred” (Gutterson 237). Ishmael recognizes his emotional numbness and hatred that he feels in his heart and this is the effect trauma has put on him. Physically, mentally, and emotionally Ishmael is forever changed by trauma and his life is no longer the

In the introduction of A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah, he writes, “There were all kinds of stories told about the war that made it sound as if it was happening in a faraway and different land. It wasn’t until refugees started passing through our town that we began to see that it was actually taking place in our country” (Beah 1). During this statement Beah says that he is completely oblivious to the war around him. These people living in Sierra Leone had adapted to the war to the point where their perception had been altered. With this memoir he shares his experiences and obstacles he faces throughout the war to become a beckon of hope in this despairing country. Ishmael uses his social skills, timely luck, and emotional strength, to find the courage to overcome these adversities and survive in and out of the war.

There may be as many as 300,000 child soldiers, hopped-up on drugs and wielding AK-47s, in more than fifty conflicts around the world. Ishmael Beah used to be one of these child soldiers  , Ishmael Beah is a child who lived most of his childhood in the war   . He is one of the first to tell his story in his own words according to  http://www.alongwaygone.com/index.html and his memoir “A Long Way Gone”. The war had made ishmael have perseverance  in the long run , inference that he was brainwashed by the war and that ishmael was a very hopeful child always wishing for better days.

In the story “A long way Gone by Ishmael Beah” Ishmael first character is innocent and childlike in the beginning of the novel. His innocence and childlike character is a significant role of characterization. Ishmael’s symbol of innocence is the moon, which is constantly being brought you into the story. “Some nights I saw the head of a man in the room...it pleases me to know that part of my childhood is still embedded with me.” It made him happy that he knew he still had his innocence and childlike manner for picturing a man as the moon. In the beginning of the novel he also is a child who has a childlike manner.“We sat together on the stoop and briefly talked about our childhood pranks...we had dancing at talent shows, practicing new dances, playing soccer until we couldn't see the ball.” The quote shows that he was a young boy who liked playing with friends and having fun. In the beginning of the novel Ishmael is innocent but once war comes around him, he changes.

Quote 1: “My childhood had gone by without me knowing, and it seemed as if my heart had frozen.”

In A long way gone, although Ishmael suffers from the atrocious status of the war, thanks to the help from various people and his efforts, he ultimately overcomes the adversity and his trauma and becomes a human rights activist to save and to defend those who are in the same situation as his childhood. Ishmael Beah, a 12-years boy, who loves rap music and dancing like general teenagers, begins to be racked with pain as he encounters the miserable war circumstance. The arduous situation of the war takes Ishmael’s family, his innocence, his identity of a child, and his childhood from him, but leaves the agony for him. To survive and to revenge on the rebels who murdered his family he enters the army. His life as a soldier traumatizes him. The war takes away his hope, dream, and pleasure, and makes him think he has: “no control over the future” (87). This claim demonstrates the replacement of his dream and delightful memory by the terrible and traumatic memory of the war. Even though those traumas, pain, and suffering ruin Ishmael’s life and mind, they force him to grow as a person and he ultimately overcomes them with his desire and other’s help. Ishmael’s change in attitude and

Ishmael Leseur is the main character in “Don’t Call Me Ishmael” a book by Michael Gerard Bauer. As a young boy, he courageously stepped up to year nine only to be bullied for his name, embarrassed in front of his first love and to become a social outcast. This leads to him naming year nine the toughest, the weirdest, the most embarrassingly awful and best year of his life.

Beah had never a home, he had never a place where he went and felt safe. Ishmael was never loved, he was just used for the benefit of others. He had to survive all the physical and emotional pain. Beah overcame the psychological problems that the war left him and learned how to regain his humanity that the army had taken from him. Ishmael never lost hope, he always looked forward for a better future. He kept having hope even when he was brainwashed by the army and was forced to do bad things. He was always hoping to survive. Despite what Ishmael lived through, he regained his humanity by the help of others but mostly by his perseverance and personal strength he could vanquish his killing thoughts and become a confident person