In the memoir of Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone, Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, Beah states that his life’s journey has been a huge obstacle, but has learned to overcome that struggle by venting while the two contradictory sides continue their battling. Beah accomplishes his goal of explaining to the reader his point of view through the use of rhetorical questions, scenic narration, and parallelism. Ishmael Beah’s apparent purpose is to share personal accounts of his life with his fellow country men, in a country where war affects people to a level beyond the imagination. He is able to apply his purpose using a grotesque and bitter tone. Beah approaches his audience of ordinary people in this manner in order to vent his feelings about war by sharing life experiences with his reader.
To begin, Beah is able to begin his process of revealing his purpose through his use of rhetorical questions. For example, Beah asks, “But what kind of liberation movement shoots innocent civilians, children, that little girl?” This question startles the reader in the way that it is presented. Beah, who is about thirteen years of age, asks this question awaiting an answer but turns into a rhetorical question when no one is able to give a retort to it. Beah is expecting a response in which someone will state how brutal and malicious the rebels actually were. Further into Ishmael Beah’s memoir, another rhetorical question comes into effect. Beah asks, “How many more times do we have to come to terms with death before we find safety?” This question depicts only a diminutive amount of emotion as Beah and his friends basically personify death. Death is seen as a human-being. In retelling this horrific event, Beah and his followers come face-to-face with death ...
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...counts of life in Sierra Leone were there are vicious killings and attacks going. Beah firmly places his life on the line various times during his journey with many people. He and his “crew” faced death various times with Beah personifying death. Beah’s life has been a great struggle with everything seeming to be a burden. Along with his struggles, war has been affecting his life greatly. A Long Way Gone, Memoirs of a Boy Soldier is a great way to show how childhood can be taken and transformed into a life of fear. Its stark language and raw vitality gives it full body to understand how so much terror is going on in our world and how we need to come to terms of peace with neighboring countries to show love for our world and for our people.
Works Cited
Beah, Ishmael. A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. New York City, New York: Sarah Crichton Books, 2007.
Throughout the book the audience has seen Ishmael go through adventure and sorrow. In the novel Ishmael is forced to go to war at age thirteen, but what keeps him going were his grandmother's wise words. His grandmother was the one who told him powerful lessons that he could use in real life. These lesson that Ishmael is keeping him grounded is not only from his grandmother but also from his friends. Lessons that were seen by the readers are “wild pigs”, “Bra Spider”, and the story about the moon.
As a child, Ishmael Beah seemed like he was playful, curious, and adventurous. He had a family that loved him, and he had friends that supported him. Before the war, Ishmael had a childhood that was similar to most of the children in the United States. Unfortunately, the love and support Ishmael grew accustom to quickly vanished. His childhood and his innocence abruptly ended when he was forced to grow up due to the Sierra Leone Civil War. In 1991, Ishmael thought about survival rather than trivial things. Where was he going to go? What was he going to eat? Was he going to make it out of the war alive? The former questions were the thoughts that occupied Ishmaels mind. Despite his efforts, Ishmael became an unwilling participant in the war. At the age of thirteen, he became a
Ishmael Beah’s first transition on his approach to family began with a strong sense of hope. Consequently, after the separation of his mother, father, and older brother his life completely changed. When he began to take his journey Beah hoped to find his family and survive the war together. In his memoir, Beah demonstrated the idea of hope when he came across a childhood memory that impacted his life. As he walked alone in the forest Beah remembered his father’s significant words of advice that motivated him to find hope and purpose. With this idea in mind, his father once said, “If you are alive, there is hope for a better day and something good to happen” (2007, P. 54). For Ishmael, his father, mother, and
Beah, Ishmael. A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. Print.
O’Brien, Tim. “How To Tell a True War Story.” The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature. Ed. Michael Meyer. Boston: Bedford St. Martins, 2003. p. 420-429.
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.
In the book A Long Way Gone written by Ishmael Beah, Ishmael survives and describes his journey while at war. Ishmael was a 13 year old who is forced to become a child soldier. He struggles through a variety of problems. In his journey, he was separated from his family and mostly running for his life. Later on, he has no problem killing people and picking up his gun. In fact, anyone can be evil at any certain time with kids changing, getting drugged, and going back to war.
Beah, Ishmael. A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. New York: Farrar, Straus and
During the war, people struggle to differentiate their enemies from friends causing people to act on fear. Survival is paramount and trusting someone can lead to the deaths of an entire village. Beah wrote,”Many times during our journey were surrounded by muscular men with machetes who almost killed us before realizing we were children just running away from war.” (Page 72, Chapter 8). War causes people to be on edge and trust is no longer a connection but a reason that could end a person's life. The major theme in “A Long Way Gone” is survival and acting based on an emotional concept can cost atrocities.
The transition of Ishmael Baeh, from innocent child to a soldier with the blood of his countrymen on his hands, is chronicled in his memoir through the usage of flashbacks that explain his memories. In the beginning of the memo...
During times of war, man is exposed to the most gruesome aspects of life such as death, starvation, and imprisonment. In some cases, the aftermath is even more disastrous, causing posttraumatic stress disorder, constant guilt, as well as physical and mental scarring, but these struggles are not the only things that humans can take away from the experience. War can bring out the appreciation of the little things in life, such as the safety people take for granted, the beauty of nature, and the kindness of others. These universal consequences of fighting all contribute to what war is really capable of doing, sometimes bringing out the best and worst in people, and constantly shaping society. In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien goes through this himself when he writes about setting up base camp in the Vietnamese pagoda, the return to site of Kiowa’s death, the story about the old poppa-san guide, and Mitchell Sanders’ “moment of peace”. When O’Brien includes these stories, it is not to insert joy into a tragedy, but rather to create a more wholesome and authentic feel into a tough, realistic war story. O’Brien’s’ “sweet” stories are there to show the hope he had during war, and also serve as a universal example that even in the darkest tunnels, it is always possible to find rays of light.
A long way gone is the factual story of Ishmael Beah who turn out to be an unenthusiastic boy warrior throughout a 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. Since they planned to come back the following day, they didn’t farewell or communicate with anyone wherever they were going, little they knew that they will certainly not come back to their families. It all started when Gibrilla and Kaloko came home early after school and they brought with them grief-stricken update for the eruption of warfare at the mining area. Amongst the mix-up, viciousness and vagueness of the warfare, Ishmael, Junior and his friends roam from settlem...
Children exposed to violence within their communities are left with emotions of hopelessness, insecurity, and doubt. Historical events such as the war on terrorism, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the tragic events of September 11th have had a detrimental effect on the entire nation, including the children. Although every child is not directly affected by the effects of war, it somehow has an emotional effect on all. The involvement of a nation in war affects every individual differently, whether it is out of fear, anger, doubt, hope, or love. In the short novel A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah, he narrates the story by telling his own involvement in the Civil War in Sierra Leone as a young boy and the many issues he faces while living in horror.
...n amnesiac nation into “working through” its troubled past.” (Bly ,189) Story telling was the soldier’s salvation, their survival method. Being able to tell their stories let them express everything they were feeling and ultimately cope with the horrors of war and the guilt the carried.
War always seems to have no end. A war between countries can cross the world, whether it is considered a world war or not. No one can be saved from the reaches of a violent war, not even those locked in a safe haven. War looms over all who recognize it. For some, knowing the war will be their future provides a reason for living, but for others the war represents the snatching of their lives without their consent. Every reaction to war in A Separate Peace is different, as in life. In the novel, about boys coming of age during World War II, John Knowles uses character development, negative diction, and setting to argue that war forever changes the way we see the world and forces us to mature rapidly.