Preview

A Long Way Gone By Ishmael Beah

Satisfactory Essays
Open Document
Open Document
277 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
A Long Way Gone By Ishmael Beah
In the story “ A Long Way Gone” the main character Ishmael Beah demonstrates a lot of violent actions. His actions begin to change throughout the entire book. One of Ishmael’s violent changes that really taught and helped me understand the many consequences that will happen when you choose to act in a violent manner is when he was going back to his village and noticed that they were being invaded, and they were getting low on food he sacrifices his life to make sure his village is ok. It teaches me that when things happen you sometimes have to change to make things better. When Ishmael and his friends were sent to participate in the war,they got addicted to drugs and started using them way more frequently now. As a consequence the boys were

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Satisfactory Essays

    " What is Pearl Harbor?"(4). The book I read was Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki. This is what started World War II. During these times Japanese people were treated like animals. They were forced to live in internment camps throughout Executive Order 9066. Executive Order 9066 was approved by Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt, this order ordered the military to place Japanese or Japanese Americans into these internment camps. This is where this story takes place, in an internment camp in Manzanar were Jeanne Wakatsuki and her family spend there time during these harsh times. Well developed characters, excellent theme, but a lacking a more entertaining plot makes Jeanne Wakatsuki's Farewell to Manzanar an exceptional book.…

    • 543 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    They soldiers went into a kitchen where MPs found them and took them to a rehabilitation center in Kissy town. Since they didn't trust anyone and craved for drug, they keep resorting to violence. Especially if they're angry. Ishmael would desperately try to remember his childhood to make him feel better, but memories from the war kept him from doing that.…

    • 431 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    In the novel A Long Way Gone Ishmael Beah describes to us what it was like to live in the terrifying times in Sierra Leone, South Africa. A civil war started from the want of mass diamond production, Streets were filled with chaos. Children traveling the streets from town to town were exposed to traumatizing and life changing events. In Beah's novel the traumatic effects of war, drug addiction, and mass murder all lead to the experience of PTSD. A post traumatic stress disorder that not only affects themselves but family members and friends also.…

    • 344 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In "A Long Way Gone" by Ishmael Beah the author describes his experiences in the Sierra Leone civil war. He faced many challenges, and this affected him in many ways. The Sierra Leone war brought Beah into conflict with his own humanity, specifically his will to live, his empathy, and his trust.…

    • 378 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Guns are a controversial thing in today’s society. Whether you are for or against them provoke fear in other’s unarmed. Guns are a way that enables anyone to gain power. In A Long Way Gone a memoir by Ishmael Beah he talks about how his early life was in Sierra Leone, where a war was going on during the time. Beah affected by the war, discussing how he felt and still feels today, “That person pointed the gun at the place where I had been shot and pulled the trigger. I woke up and hesitantly touched my side. I became afraid, since I could no longer tell the difference between dream and reality” (15). Beah tells the reader how his mental health has declined as distinguishing the difference from reality and his dreams are not present. This inability…

    • 340 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Throughout history wars have been fought mercilessly and without remorse especially in guerilla warfare. In A Long Way Gone, author Ishmael beah, explains in vivid detail his experience during the war and the horrors it came with. Throughout his journey he tends to see the environment around him fall apart. While it may seem hellish and unforgiving nature itself tries to run from the war. Nature itself does not consider war to be natural since it is driven by murder rather than…

    • 87 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    While he and his friends are away for a talent show, their village is raided by rebels. The gruesome storytelling in A Long Way Gone is striking for many reasons on several levels. At one point Ishmael writes, “We are not like the rebels, those riffraff who kill people for no reason.” The narrative takes an unexpected turn by closing with Beah recalling a philosophical moment from his early childhood. In the final pages of the novel, Beah explains a story told to him and other children in his village once a year: you are a hunter prepared to kill a monkey with a rifle; before you shoot, the monkey tells you that if you kill him, your mother will die and if you don’t, your father will. None of the children ever reveal their own answer to what…

    • 275 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In the book Long Way Gone Ishmael Beah struggles between trust and survival in the midst of a gruesome war. He laments how, “the war had destroyed the enjoyment of the very experience of meeting people” throughout the book there are many examples of this upsetting truth. The consequences of this mistrust in people are clear as he travels through Sierra Leon while being incessantly threatened and assumed a member of the RUF. Most of this book is about the ongoing struggle within Ishmael between trying to stay alive and deciding who to trust. The phenomena of war and trust can coexist only if you have an ability to differentiate your friends from enemies. Ishmael struggles throughout the book to stay alive, and thus decides to trust no one, but this could be detrimental to his survival.…

    • 587 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Ishmael was mentally and physically challenged as a child solider. The RUF constrained the children to do medications, for example, cocaine, pot, and "chestnut cocoa," which give them the guts to fight and the ability to forget their emotions in times of war. Their everyday presence is a battle of survival, Beah wind up submitting acts he would never have done for example, taking nourishment from kids and killing innocent villagers. If Ishmael or any other child soldier didn’t comply with what the RUF soldiers told them to do, their families and anything they love would be threatened. The novel A Long Way Gone makes an incredible showing with regards to delineating the life of a child…

    • 118 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Long Way Gone Theme

    • 298 Words
    • 2 Pages

    In Ishmael Beah's autobiographical narrative "A Long Way Gone", the theme of the story is to never give up, because throughout the book the main character faces numerous difficult situations, and manages to overcome them. First, Beah's responses towards certain problems show the reader his will to survive. For instance, when Ishmael and his friends are all alone after escaping from rebels, he states, "we had no idea where we would go or even how to get to a safe place, but we were determined to find one" (Beah 36). We see how he is driven to find a way to safety even in the midst of a war. Second, we see the theme in action when Beah “feels as if he is always waiting for death to come…

    • 298 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Ishmael Beah

    • 761 Words
    • 4 Pages

    For example, we see on page 100 that Beah is sick just looking at dead bodies, “One of them lay on his stomach, and his eyes were wide open and still; his insides were spilling onto the ground. I turned away, and my eyes caught the smashed head of another man. Something inside his brain was still pulsating and he was breathing. I felt nauseated. Everything began to spin around me.” (12.100) Any normal boy who still has his innocence and fun left would obviously feel remorse for this man and start to feel lightheaded. A couple sentences later, the soldier says to Ishmael that he would soon get used to it, which foreshadows upcoming events where he becomes a child soldier. We see only 22 pages later that Ishmael has lost all of the innocence he had and becomes unremorseful, “So when the lieutenant gave orders, I shot as many as I could, but I didn’t feel better. After every gunfight we would enter the rebel camp, killing those we had wounded”. (14.122) We see here that Ishmael is no longer that normal boy who likes to listen to rap cassettes and recite Shakespeare. He has grown into a full grown killer who hates all rebels with passion. Beah also supports this theme in the story because this is where we see that he has stopped putting in flashbacks to his childhood because he has lost everything, even his…

    • 761 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Till it´s gone Robert Crumb born in Philadelphia 1943 (73 year), also called R. Crumb, has made 1992: short history of America, which is a colorful short cartoon about America throughout the past years. The pictures remind me of a song called "Don´t know what you got, till it´s gone” because, in the comic strip the wonderful nature is destroyed, and eventually the people who lived there have planted trees which I think is a sign that when we destroyed nature, we realized what we had lost, and regretted it. Industry is a big success for the world, but at the end, people will long for the past. “Don´t know what you got till it´s gone Don´t know what it is I did so wrong…

    • 630 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Moishe the Beatle was very significant being the character who bridges the light-hearted beginning of the story to the vividly dark narrative it became. His introductory into the story was of a very poor man who Eliezer sought to be taught of Jewish faith. Moishe was very to himself and did not beg and did not want to be pitied for his way of life. The bridge that turns this story dark is when he experiences a concentration camp and escapes. The injury to his leg was proof enough, but the people amongst his town did not believe a single word that was coming out of his mouth. Oh how they were wrong to not listen to his…

    • 119 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Essay On A Long Way Gone

    • 745 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Ishmael and his friends were ushered out to the middle of the village to listen to the lieutenant speak. He mostly talked about how they are running out of soldiers and they need more people to fight and protect the village. The lieutenant was standing on several bricks and stated, “I am sorry to show you these gruesome bodies, especially with your children present. But then again, all of us here have seen death or even shaken hands with it.” He then pointed to two bodies bleeding out, “This man and this child decided to leave this morning even though I had told them it was dangerous. The man insisted that he didn't want to be a part of our war, so I gave him his wish and let him go. Look what happened”(Page 107). There was a choice to join or not to join but, if the choice not to join was picked, Ishmael and his friends would have to leave the village and be off on their own again. Alhaji, one of Ishmael’s friends from his former village said to Ishmael, “We had no choice. Leaving the village was as good as being dead”(Page…

    • 745 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Home is a place where most experience ultimate comfort, security, and emotional ties. As reading Joan Didion’s “On Going Home” you can feel the tone and passion she has towards home, especially proven when she states, “Days pass. I see no one. I come to dread my husband’s evening call, not only because he is full of news of what by now seems to me our remote life in Los Angeles, people he has seen, letters which require attention, but because he ask what I have been doing, suggests uneasily that I get out and drive away, instead I drive across the river to a family graveyard.”(141) She’s completely content on being satisfied by home with its simple ways and family surroundings. That’s why going home to Joan is the ultimate comfort, security, and emotional relief; because she’s with family.…

    • 682 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays