Ishmael’s dreams are typically violent and often terrify him. His nightmares typically consist of violence consistent with what he experienced in Sierra Leone. As he describes: “these days I live in three worlds: my dreams, and the experiences of my new life, which trigger memories from the past” (Beah 20). While his dreams remind him of the horrors of war he encountered, it helps him cope with the issues of his childhood. As a result of his dreams, he is able to accept his treatment in Sierra Leone, while moving past his early tragedies and start a new life. Beah’s use of figurative language functions as a way to connect the audience to what he is experiencing. For example, he uses the simile “others curled up like a child in the womb” (Beah …show more content…
Initially, he wants to avoid the war, but eventually he decides killing is the only way out and the rebel forces manipulate him into fighting in the war. After he is rescued by UNICEF, he must decide whether to remain loyal to the rebels or work towards changing his life. The lines are blurred between good and evil when comparing the government and the rebels. Beah encounters this while at the UNICEF camp with boys from both sides, recalling that “we began to fight each other day and night” (Beah 139). Both sides believe they are fighting for good. The novel suggests that everyone must decide between good and evil, and sometimes the distinction is unclear. Fear is a constant presence during the novel. Towards the beginning, Ishmael hides in the forest out of fear of being captured. He is initially terrified once he is captured; however, he turns to drugs while fighting in order to suppress his fear, describing his experience as “all I felt was numbness to everything” (Beah 121). As a result, he loses his humanity as he becomes more lethal. He fights the government child soldiers at UNICEF out of fear for his own safety. Beah is constantly afraid of his surroundings and relies on drugs at a certain point to help him
Ishmael became a victim of the war the moment he became a boy soldier. He was only a young teen at the time, where substances took over his life, as he states, “In the daytime, instead of playing soccer in the village square,
He suffered the loss of his family, friends, and the place he once called home. He lived running from the rebels and having to learn how to survive on his own. Living in fear, he hid in a forest where he soon ran into some kids his age he recognized from school. (Beah 55)Throughout the journey, they began to become close and formed a really close friendship, but life would not let happiness rise in the midst of this war and Ishmael had to live through the death of someone he had learned to call family.(Beah 85) Injustice was kept awake throughout Ishmael's journey never seeming fully satisfied with the pain it was causing, it kept waiting for any moment in his life where happiness and improvement seemed to be present,just to drag him back down into this whole of darkness where he had to drag himself back up repeatedly just to be put down again and
Ishmael changes for the bad and for the good throughout this entire memoir because of the war in Sierra Leone. The beginning of the novel is set in Ishmael’s village. He is innocent and is unaware of the true pain of war. For example, Ishmael did things
As Ishmael Beah becomes accustomed to the cruel life during war in Sierra Leone, Ishmael learns that ensuring trust within the companions he meets on the battlefield keeps him “human” throughout the duration of the war against the rebels, as is displayed in A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah. After Ishmael and his brother, Junior escape from a village Junior whispers quietly, “I do not think that this madness will last ... he looked at me as if to assure me that we would soon go home” (Beah 15).
Furthermore, Beah has struggled with losing his family and is brain washed that he starts to lose his humanity. To clarify, when the rebels were planning an attack on a village Beah releases his anger on the rebels by shooting as many rebels from the other village as he can. “Whenever I looked at rebels during raids, I got angrier, because they looked like the rebels who played cards in the ruins of the village where I had lost my family. So when the lieutenant gave orders, I shot as many as I could, but I didn't feel any better”(122). In this moment, the pain that Beah has from losing his family turns into hatred for the rebels that killed his loved ones and Beah believes that killing more
The military leaders begin to manipulate Ishmael before he even enters the army. When the lieutenant confronts Ishmael, Beah is given an “option” to join the army, or to leave the village. Ishmael joins the army, as he expresses that he had no choice at all. The lieutenant shows Ishmael the body of a diseased man, who was said to have left the village, disregarding the warning from the leader. The lieutenant says that he “decided to show [Ishmael], so that [he could] fully understand the situation [they were] in” (108).
Ishmael being born as a villager, the most important thing for him was to know his wild life and greenery, Ishmaels Grandparents were brought up a lot for how they taught him of plants and medicine. The period where Ishmael became lost in the forest and depressing thoughts clouded his mind, really goes to show how lonely times were for him and how hard it was to deal with all of the family lost and war. Ishmael's only way of staying alive and safe from the gangs that went from town to town killing, burning, raping and destroying villagers along with their homes, was running
Throughout these pages, Beah discusses his journey into becoming a soldier for the Sierra Leone Army. Within a very short time of being exposed to war, Beah had been brainwashed to kill all rebels, raided villages, become addicted to drugs, suffered from insomnia, lost all sense of reality, and described killing as “as easy as drinking water” (Beah 122). I think it is safe to say that war certainly wrecked and altered Beah's life in unimaginable ways, as it turned a gentle, innocent, rap-loving boy into a brainwashed, drug-addicted, killing
He no longer feels as if he has control of his future. Right now he is compelled to do anything possible to survive. Like most children Ishmael is afraid to run away, he decides to join the army. When Ishmael first started off in the war as a solider he felt traumatized, disgusted, and horrified by his experiences. On page 100 Ishmael encounters several dead bodies, it was such a traumatizing experience for him; he felt like he was going to throw up.
In the book A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, the importance of family is a very big topic. Ishmael Beah writes so much about family because during his childhood and during his time as a child soldier in Sierra Leone, he had many different families. Each of these families that he belonged to had something special about them and offered him something different that also proved to be necessary for him at the time. During his time in Sierra Leone, Beah was part of his many families. His families were: his own family, a group of seven boys that he traveled with, his small squad in the military, Esther from the Benin Home where he was being rehabilitated, his uncle Tommy’s family, and Laura, his mother in the United States.
Ishmael struggles constantly encounters gore and blood as his journey progress. From one town to another he sees government soldier to rebel soldier using the same method to kill. Ishmael has an internal battle to keep moving forward as he sees family being ripped away from
The Sierra Leonean Civil War had a very negative effect on Beah. Ishmael Beah lost his brother, his mother, his father, his friends, his uncle, his belongings, and his mentality. This theme is important because it shows the consequences of war. It changed who Beah was. Before the war, Beah was an ordinary African school boy who after school played with his little brother, Junior.
Have you ever thought about the traumatizing events Elie and Ishmael have experienced? Although both authors experience physical and mental pain, there are differences between them. Ishmael and Elie are two young boys who encounter deadly events which change them as a person; one becomes an unwilling boy soldier while the other is taken in as a prisoner. Both Night and A Long Way Gone tell the story Elie who is a young boy trying to survive as a prisoner of war, while, Ishmael Beah is a boy fighting for his life as a boy soldier; neither boy has control over their situation. “When they withdrew, there were two dead bodies next to me, the father and son” (Wiesel 102).
After the “white tablet” Beah takes to boost his energy before battle wheres off following his return that night, he is faced with an extreme nightmare where Beah dreams, “... I was picking up Josiah from the tree stump and a gunman stood on top of me. He placed his gun on my forehead. I immediately woke up from my dream and began shooting inside the tent” (120). This intense nightmare from Beah shows how war, especially at this young of an age causes extreme difficulties as they take drugs to try to cover up these problems which does not last. Succeeding the wars end, after falling asleep reading the lyrics of a song in rehabilitation,
Ishmael is at the rehabilitation center with other boys who were in the war. He discovers some of the boys are fighting for the rebels side, and with partisan views, a huge fight starts. The boys are throwing punches and stabbing each other. Ishmael began kicking a boy that went after him, and then Alhaji stabs him in the back. They both “...continued kicking the boy until he stopped moving”.