Ishmael Beah: The Impact That Drugs Have On Child Soldiers

184 Words1 Page

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

Show More
Related

  • Ishmael Beah's Recovery

    786 Words  | 2 Pages

    Ishmael was a normal 12 year old boy in a small village in Sierra Leone when his life took a dramatic turn and he was forced into a war. War has very serious side effects for all involved and definitely affected the way Ishmael views the world today. He endured and saw stuff that most people will never see in a lifetime let alone as a young child. Ishmael was shaped between the forced use of drugs, the long road to recovery and the loss of innocence of his

    Read More

  • A Long Way Gone Rhetorical Analysis

    445 Words  | 1 Pages

    Throughout the course of this novel, Ishmael Beah keeps the readers on the edge of their seat by incorporating interchanging tones. At the beginning of the novel, the tone can be depicted as naïve, for Beah was unaware to what was actually occurring with the rebels. Eventually, the tone shifts to being very cynical and dark when he depicts the fighting he has endured both physically and mentally. However, the most game changing tone is towards the end of the novel in chapters nineteen and twenty. His tone can be understood as independent or prevailing. It can be portrayed as independent because Beah learns how to survive on his own and to take care of himself. At the same time, it is perceived as prevailing and uplifting because Beah was able to demonstrate that there is hope. Later in the novel, Beah travels to

    Read More

  • A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah

    1026 Words  | 3 Pages

    Hope enables people to move on by providing the thought that maybe tomorrow’s events will be better than today’s. Hope is a theme that remains constant in every part of A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah. Ishmael begins the novel optimistic, believing he will find his family again. This optimism is later lost when Ishmael is recruited by the army to fight against the rebels, causing him to become addicted to drugs and the thrill of killing. Three years after his recruitment, Ishmael is rescued by UNICEF-a group dedicated to rehabilitating child soldiers. During his rehabilitation, Ishmael discovers hope once more by relearning how to trust, love, and have the will to survive. The presence of hope throughout A Long Way Gone enables Ishmael to have an ability to move on and a will to survive that he lacks when he loses hope.

    Read More

  • Compare The Bite Of The Mango And Sierra Leone

    1126 Words  | 3 Pages

    A vivid use of description when discussing stories about the war in Sierra Leone drastically impacts the readers. The war in Sierra Leone broke out in March of 1991, and it lasted until 2000. This war happened because a group of men believed that the recently independent government of Sierra Leone was corrupt (Bah pg. 2-3).The Revolutionary United Front, or the rebels, began to attack villages in attempt to overthrow the government. They typically cut off the hands and feet of civilians. RUF grew, and they took over much of the countryside. Then, they began to attack Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, continuing their attempt to overthrow the government. They killed and wounded thousands, and they robbed

    Read More

  • Analysis: The Cellist Of Sarajevo

    1591 Words  | 4 Pages

    The conflict that the individual faces will force them to reinforce and strengthen their identity in order to survive. In “The Cellist of Sarajevo” all the characters experience a brutal war that makes each of them struggle albeit in different ways. Each of them have their own anxieties and rage that eventually makes them grow as characters at the end of the book. When looking at what makes a person who they are it becomes obvious that the struggles they have faced has influenced them dramatically. The individual will find that this development is the pure essence of what it truly means to be

    Read More

  • Stripped Innocence: Impact of War on Soldiers' Humanity

    1939 Words  | 4 Pages

    In the novel All quiet on the western front by Erich Maria Remarque one of the major themes he illustrates is the effects of war on a soldier 's humanity. Paul the protagonist is a German soldier who is forced into war with his comrades that go through dehumanizing violence. War is a very horrid situation that causes soldiers like Paul to lose their innocence by stripping them from happiness and joy in life. The symbols Remarque uses to enhance this theme is Paul 's books and the potato pancakes to depict the great scar war has seared on him taking all his connections to life. Through these symbols they deepen the theme by visually depicting war’s impact on Paul. Paul’s books represent the shadow war that is casted upon Paul and his loss of innocence. This symbol helps the theme by depicting how the war locked his heart to old values by taking his innocence. The last symbol that helps the theme are the potato pancakes. The potato pancakes symbolize love and sacrifice by Paul’s mother that reveal Paul emotional state damaged by the war with his lack of happiness and gratitude.

    Read More

  • John Updike’s A & P, Richard Wright’s The Man Who Was Almost a Man, and James Joyce’s Araby

    1298 Words  | 3 Pages

    ...the future to see that his life is not ruined by acts of immaturity. And, in “Araby”, we encounter another young man facing a crisis of the spirit who attempts to find a very limiting connection between his religious and his physical and emotional passions. In all of these stories, we encounter boys in the cusp of burgeoning manhood. What we are left with, in each, is the understanding that even if they can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel, we can. These stories bind all of us together in their universal messages…youth is something we get over, eventually, and in our own ways, but we cannot help get over it.

    Read More

  • Trauma for Soldiers in "The Things They Carried" by Tim O’Brien

    884 Words  | 2 Pages

    Trauma can be defined as something that repeats itself. In The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, trauma recurs in soldiers for different reasons. However, although their reasons for trauma are different, the things they carried can symbolize all the emotions and pasts of these soldiers. One man may suffer trauma from looking through letters and photographs of an old lover, while another man could feel trauma just from memories of the past. The word “carried” is used repeatedly throughout The Things They Carried. Derived from the Latin word “quadrare,” meaning “suitable,” O’Brien uses the word “carried” not to simply state what the men were carrying, but to give us insight into each soldiers’ emotions and character, his past, and his present.

    Read More

  • A Long Way Gone Analysis

    808 Words  | 2 Pages

    ...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.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of A Long Way Gone By Ishmael Beah

    1020 Words  | 3 Pages

    An attention-grabbing story of a youngster’s voyage from end to end. In “A LONG WAY GONE,” Ishmael Beah, at present twenty six years old tells a fascinating story he had always kept from everyone. When he was twelve years of age, he escaped attacking the revolutionaries and roamed a land-living rendered distorted by violence. By thirteen, he’d been chosen up by the government military and Ishmael Beah at nature a gentle young boy, bring into being that 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 at preceding a story of revitalisation and hopefulness.

    Read More

  • Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

    1230 Words  | 3 Pages

    Even though there seems to be many translations of this story which all seem to be slightly different, they do seem to come together in some odd way. The story does not have to mean one thing or the other. It can have multiple meanings depending on the point of view of the reader. This could be a tragic story of rape and murder. It can be a social commentary on the evils of drugs and rock and roll. It could be a fantasy which is fueled by drugs, or it can be a lesson on life and who we should trust.

    Read More

  • In Another Country of Hemingway

    604 Words  | 2 Pages

    ...is story, Hemingway brings the readers back the war and see what it caused to human as well as shows that how the war can change a man's life forever. We think that just people who have been exposed to the war can deeply understand the unfortunates, tolls, and devastates of the war. He also shared and deeply sympathized sorrows of who took part in the war; the soldiers because they were not only put aside the combat, the war also keeps them away from community; people hated them as known they are officers and often shouted " down with officers" as they passing. We have found any blue and mournful tone in this story but we feel something bitter, a bitter sarcasm. As the war passing, the soldiers would not themselves any more, they became another ones; hunting hawks, emotionless. They lost everything that a normal man can have in the life. the war rob all they have.

    Read More

  • Children of Conflict in Afghanistan

    1303 Words  | 3 Pages

    Children of Conflict: Afghanistan In the crowded city of Kabul, there is a growing population of about six million children who drop out of school to work and support their families. These children over work themselves every day to earn 10 cents per plastic bag, running between cars after pedestrians. Girls disguise themselves as boys so they would be able to go and sell plastic bags and earn a few Afghanis to get some bread to feed the family. The United Nations estimates that there are about fifty-thousand street children in Kabul alone.

    Read More

  • Critical Analysis Of Epiphany In Araby By James Joyce

    1298 Words  | 3 Pages

    He has grown up in the backwash of a dying city and has developed into an individual sensitive to the fact that his town’s vivacity has receded, leaving the faintest echoes of romance, a residue of empty piety, and symbolic memories of an active concern for God and mankind that no longer exists. Although the young boy cannot fully comprehend it intellectually, he feels that his surroundings have become malformed and ostentatious. He is at first as blind as his surroundings, but Joyce prepares us for his eventual perceptive awakening by mitigating his carelessness with an unconscious rejection of the spiritual stagnation of his community. Upon hitting Araby, the boy realizes that he has placed all his love and hope in a world that does not exist outside of his imagination. He feels angry and betrayed and comes to realize his self-deception, describing himself as “a creature driven and derided by vanity”, a vanity all his own (Joyce). This, inherently, represents the archetypal Joycean epiphany, a small but definitive moment after which life is never quite the same. This epiphany, in which the boy lives a dream in spite of the disagreeable and the material, is brought to its inevitable conclusion, with the single sensation of life disintegrating. At the moment of his realization, the narrator finds that he is able to better understand his particular circumstance, but, unfortunately, this

    Read More

  • Men in The Sun, A Review

    748 Words  | 2 Pages

    The three men in this novel represent the people who abandoned their homeland in search for a better life. This is what happens to people who abandon their homeland, their death is a shameful and undignified death not like the people who die defending their country where they are honored and looked up to. Abul Khaizuran represents the leader who betrays his people by promising them to fulfill their dreams but instead he led them to their death and he only cared to fulfill his personal needs. The road represents the struggle of life the characters go through to reach their dreams and the desert represents the obstacles that keep them for achieving the dreams. The three men had to knock to be saved but the never knocked, the Palestinians need to raise their voice in order to be heard just like knocking on the tank.

    Read More

More about Ishmael Beah: The Impact That Drugs Have On Child Soldiers

Open Document