Essays on A Long Way Gone

About the Book

Ishmael Beah writes his life experience as an unwilling child soldier in Sierra Leone’s civil war in the account called A Long Way Gone. At the age of 12 years the village Beah called home is attacked but he escapes the violence because he is with a group of his friends elsewhere performing rap music. In the village where they visited for their rap fun they heard about the attack on their village “According to the teachers, the rebels had attacked the mining areas in the afternoon. The sudden outburst of gunfire had caused people to run for their ...

General Forum Discussion

In “A Long Way Gone,” Beah writes that a young boy he was forced to become a child soldier and had to deal with violence as well as death. Later in his memoir, Beah writes that he was discharged from his military duties and given to UNICEF for rehabilitation. Violence had become second nature to him, and the rehabilitation process was rather difficult for Beah. However, he was successfully able to be rehabilitated and went to live with his uncle. After his uncle's death, another conflict threatens to send him back to being a soldier again. Beah had chosen exile instead of ...

They Poured Fire on Us From the Sky by Benjamin Ajak and Benson Deng is a classic example of what it means to grow up amid war, to live in an environment in which all one knows is war. The impact of this is clearly evident in this chilling account of the war in Sudan. However, historically, this is not the only account of children who have had to grow up in war-torn parts of the world. Other anthropological sources have indicated such circumstances for children, including A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah and That Mad Game: Growing Up ...

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 course, there are many different ...

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 looking unto them ...

In the novel, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, Ishmael Beah explores the theme of overwhelming fear and the terrible impact it has on people. The hysteria war releases is instantaneous and causes people to behave abnormally and destructively. It makes people disoriented and react panicky and in a peculiar manner. It spoils relationships and creates distrust among people; even family members. It affects every single decision a person makes, as fear of death pushes him to choose a certain path. War creates a panic, which confuses people. Ishmael watches as the rebels fool with an old man, pretending to ...

Classic English Literature:

Essay :

In the novel, A Long Way Gone : Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, Ishmael Beah explores the theme of overwhelming fear and the terrible impact it has on people. The hysteria war releases is instantaneous and causes people to behave abnormally and destructively. It makes people disoriented and react in a panicky and peculiar manner. It spoils relationships and creates distrust among people; even family members. It affects every single decision a person makes, as fear of death pushes him to choose a certain path. War creates a panic, which confuses people. Ishmael watches as rhe rebels fool with an old ...

In his memoir A Long Way Gone, Ishmael Beah recounts his time as a child soldier in the government army of Sierra Leone, when he was just thirteen years old. Now living in the United States, he looks back on his experiences at the age of twenty-six and recalls the intense suffering he endured during this war, including hunger and extreme privation, witnessing the torture and murder of many innocent civilians, and learning to kill and torture himself. In the end, he became as brutal and dehumanized as the people who had destroyed his family and home. His main themes ...

Introduction

The book; A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier is a true story by Ishmael Beah recording the accounts of more than a decade of civic conflict in Sierra Leone. The book is a report of how war is in the eyes of the eyes of a child who has been drugged and armed and then put send to fight in many conflicts across the world. although child soldiers have been covered by journalists and novelists have continuously tried to create stories out of the life of child soldiers, Ishmael Beah’s memoir provides a first hand version and presents the facts as ...