Essays on A Long Way Gone

Violence in A Long Way Gone

Ishmael Beah’s memoir A Long Way Gone, the tale of his time as a child soldier in Sierra Leone, is a gut-wrenching tale of child violence and loss of identity and connection with others. One of the most intriguing things about the book is its depiction of the violent setting Ishmael lives in; after his parents were killed and be was brought into a rebel army unit, Ishmael “became a ruthless, drug-addled killing machine,” only to be surreptitiously handed over to UNICEF some time later and asked to integrate into a more developed, Western life (Rayman, 2008). Of

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Transformation is a theme that has come out strongly in the three novels ‘a lesson before dying’, ‘A Doll's House’ and ‘A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier’. Through the stories, the characters are encountered by uncomfortable situations where they have to fight their way out. The hardships that they went through proved to be significant not only to them but also served the purpose of delivering the others around them. Despite what they had to go, at the end they appreciated the fact that it was in fact through their crisis that the others who were

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