A Long Way Gone is a novel written in first person point of view by Ishmael Beah, as a child soldier who learned how to survive independently. The author uses figurative language and detailed descriptions to create realistic images, using the five senses. Ishmael’s use of words creates a vivid picture in the reader’s mind, so they can see and feel what Ishmael experienced. Ishmael is a young boy who lives in Mogbwemo, Sierra Leone and loves rap music. However, the peace didn't last, a war broke out unexpectedly in his village and was led by the rebels. Therefore, Ishmael, his brother, and his friends had to find a way to escape from the rebels. Unfortunately, he lost his family and friends along the way. Since Ishmael experienced many difficulties as he learned how to be independent. As a result, he became a soldier in an army to avenge for his family and friends by being brainwashed rebel-killing machine on drugs. In Ishmael’s perspective, being a soldier for a few years felt like forever. In his thoughts, the army was like his family until he was sent to a rehabilitation in Freetown. Initially, he struggled to get over the drugs and horrible nightmares, but with …show more content…
This novel not just only uses figurative language to let the reader’s mind imagine, but it also includes strong word choice. In other words, I would recommend this novel to everyone with any interest because this book allows the audience to sympathize with the author as they read along. Survival, revenge, and family were important to Ishmael. Personally, I would have agreed to take the same actions as Ishmael did and you would too. No matter what choices you choose in life, it's up to you. Like one had said, “If you want to succeed as much as you want to breathe, you'll succeed.” Without the experiences and failures, there's no success, which Ishmael
A prominent theme in A Long Way Gone is about the loss of innocence from the involvement in the war. A Long Way Gone is the memoir of a young boy, Ishmael Beah, wanders in Sierra Leone who struggles for survival. Hoping to survive, he ended up raiding villages from the rebels and killing everyone. One theme in A long Way Gone is that war give innocent people the lust for revenge, destroys childhood and war became part of their daily life.
No one knows what will happen in his or her life whether it is a trivial family dispute or a civil war. Ishmael Beah and Mariatu Kamara are both child victims of war with extremely different life stories. Both of them are authors who have written about their first-hand experience of the truth of the war in order to voice out to the world to be aware of what is happening. Beah wrote A Long Way Gone while Kamara wrote The Bite of the Mango. However, their autobiographies give different information to their readers because of different points of view. Since the overall story of Ishmael Beah includes many psychological and physical aspects of war, his book is more influential and informative to the world than Kamara’s book.
...ploys children rather than men. He is subjected to the violence of the war for more than three years before he is finally rescued by an organization dedicated to rehabilitating child soldiers. Once Ishmael discovers happiness, affection, and a will to survive, he regains what hope he had lost. No matter the circumstances concerning it, hope has always been the trigger for events in Ishmael’s life, thus making hope a theme present throughout the entirety of A Long Way Gone. Hope allows Ishmael to bounce back from the tragic events that marked his teenage years and discover a will to survive.
The first story Ishmael tells is that of the takers. Every story is based on a premise. The taker premise is that the world was made for man. If the world is made for man, then it belongs to him, and man can do what ever he pleases with it. It's our environment, our seas, our solar system, etc. The world is a support system for man. It is only a machine designed to produce and sustain human life.
equal value. Throughout the memoir “A Long Way Gone” by Ishmael Beah, we get to see his
At nature, a gentle young boy, he was accomplished of really dreadful deeds. Few days later on the rampage he is unrestricted by military and referred to a UNICEF rehabilitation centre, he wriggled to re-claim his humankind and to re-enter the biosphere of non-combatants, who seen him with terror and distrust. This is a story of revitalisation and hopefulness. CHRONOLIGICAL ARRANGEMENT OF EVENTS THAT LEAD TO CONFLICTS A long way gone is the factual story of Ishmael Beah, who turns out to be an unenthusiastic boy warrior throughout civil warfare in Sierra Leone. In Chapter 1, at twelve years of age, January 1993 Beah’s town is attacked while he is gone performing in a rap group with accomplice’s.
Ishmael Beah is a happy 12 year old boy who loves to perform rap dance with his friends in Sierra Leone. While he and his friends were away, their village was attacked. War had unexpectedly caught
Being a soldier, Ishmael is forced to commit horrendous crimes. He’s forced to do drugs like cocaine and marijuana and watch war-filled movies. After each invasion the boys are rewarded for their killings. Ishmael is rescued by UNICEF after three years. However, he struggles to escape his world of, “kill or be killed.”
The story takes in Ishmael’s younger years in 1996-1998 in his home village in the country and later to NewYork, America. He runs through undname destroyed villages running away with a group of friends or just alone in the middle of nowhere. He later becomes becoming a boy soldier in the second half to fight the rebels that caused all his troubles. He later past his hard life and moved back
Throughout the text, Beah uses similes to emphasise the impact that drugs have on child soldiers in Sierra Leone. As Beah depicts how he was given strange “white capsules” to help him and his fellow child soldiers fight in wars forces the readers to re-think their previously thought assumptions regarding global child treatment. The drugs were given to the children as part of a campaign to weaponise the children. Ishmael Beah employs similes to bring into light how massive the effect of drugs were on child soldiers, these similes are used by Beah in conjunction with horrific imagery to provide a sense of surrealism that allows the audience to realise that all of the events taking place actually happened to Beah and is still happening globally
It is worth noting here that while many would merely chalk Ishmael’s boundless pontifications on naivety, that as literary critic Nina Baym explains, “the voice we hear is not that of the morose Ishmael who went to sea as a substitute for suicide, found escape by submitting himself to the will of a charismatic captain, and confronted annihilation in the shape of a white whale. It is the voice of the returned traveler with a far wider scope who is now writing a book” (917). At the moment that Ishmael is writing his book, he has already lived through a far worse experience than Ahab ever endured, and therefore possesses the same propensity for gloom and insanity to which Ahab once clung.
Reflection: This quote displays how happiness and innocence can still be regained. Ishmael is going through the most terrible frightening time in his life, but he is still able to connect with his happiness and inner child. I believe that is something anyone can obtain, no matter what you've been through, and this quote proves that further. This quote also shows the repeating theme of nature. It is saying even through the madness nature is still beautiful, it still holds its peace. Much like the people of Sierra Leone.
...ys, they are seized by soldiers and taken to a village engrossed by the military fighting back at the rebels. The fellow children soldiers became Ishmael’s only family at the time, and each of them were supplemented with a white pill, “The corporal said it will boost your energy” says a young soldier. (116) Little did Ishmael and the others know that the tablet was an illicit drug given to them to fight their fatigue and anxiety for a short term to better them in combat with the rebels. Beah unknowingly alters into a blood-craving animal, who kills with numbness and no emotion. “I was not afraid of these lifeless bodies. I despised them and kicked them to flip them.” (119) Ishmael now relies and is addicted to drugs to get through his day-to-day life, including smoking marijuana, and constantly snorting “brown brown” (121) which is a mixture of gunpowder and cocaine.
A Long Way Gone is the memoir of Ishmael Beah about his time as a child soldier in Sierra Leone. As I read through chapter after chapter of horror filled tales where Ishmael and his friends get shot and beaten and tortured and have to survive the war, I reached the point
When someone kills another person’s family they will get recrimination on that person, with this comes great consequence which can result in long-term suffering or even death. Overall violence and the war have impacted Ishmael’s life and have served a permanent spot with Ishmael, and he may never return to the sweet innocent boy he once was. There is no life to be found in violence. Every act of violence brings us closer to