Comparing A Long Way Gone And Bite Of The Mango

Within Ishmael Beah’s book A Long Way Gone we see the sierra leone civil war take over and consume a young boy’s life. During Ishmael’s life his settings change rapidly because of the war, this causes him to change with his surroundings. Throughout the book the 3 reoccurring themes has to be family, death and food.

An autobiography, of which Ishmael Beah unwillingly becomes a child solider due to a civil war that has arisen in Sierra Leone. Before the attacks had happen, Ishmael and his elder brother Junior had gone from home to perform Rap in Mattru Jong with their friends. Not long after their arrival, news of the rebels had come to their attention having raided their home town and no sign of their families being unscarred from the warfare. Ishmael, and his group of friends sought out to travel to each village seeking out their family. However trouble comes across due to the majority of RUF rebel attacks were caused by children around their age, many villagers had no trust for these kids.

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

Some of these ways are loss of self control and impulsiveness which both relate to Ishmael, because he had no feelings self-control and impulsiveness because he had no consideration of what could happen to him during the war or what he was doing to other people. The text says “Drugs are chemicals because of their chemical structures, can affect the body in many different ways. Some drugs can even change a person's body and brain in ways that last long after the person has stopped taking drugs”. This quote is important because it proves how drugs change and it tells the affects people. Now I will show how Ishmael was traumatised.

Ishmael Beah, recalls his time as an orphaned child soldier, in Sierra leone, in his memoir A long way gone. Amongst those who were moved by the memorable piece of literature, there are those who quarrel with the idea that it is a completely factual account of the events that took place in Sierra Leone and the details regarding the physical wounds he obtained. While some of the claims made against its accuracy made are valid, It does not diminish the merit of the memoir. Beah’s escapade as a child soldier, his rehabilitation and the universal themes contribute to the immense worth of the novel, and allow the reader to walk away enlightened.

Ishmael Beah is only twelve years­old when his village in Mattru Jong is attacked in January of 1993. He happened to be on his way to another village to perform a show with his brother, Junior and a few of his other friends at the time. That’s when his entire life is turned around. He has to travel from place to place, running from rebels (Revolutionary United Front), struggling to survive, losing his brother in the process. Eventually, he is alone and meets another group of boys that he recognized from his secondary school back in Mattru Jong.

Not experiencing war is a luxury many people unfortunately do not get; however, Ishmael Beah, the author of A Long Way Gone, lives and survives the war, though not without heartache. With war there is always fear, death, and hell. Ishmael Beah proves war is hell through the killing of civilians, the distrust, and the after effects of the war. Ishmael proves war is hell through the killing of civilians. Many innocent bystanders of the war are forced out of their homes, made to run for their lives.

A Long Way Gone, written by Ishmael Beal and published on February 13, 2007, is a novel that depicts the account of a child soldier. The novel takes place in the west African Country Sierra Leone, during the time of a merciless Civil War. The novel has many different themes in it such as loss, love, death, pain, destruction, and hope, all of these themes help show the readers the impact that the war had on the country and its people. The novel contains many graphic scenes involving death and blood all to experienced by a child. A Lone Way Gone depicts the inconceivable injustice towards the people of Sierra Leone through the eyes of a child, making the injustices even more momentous to the readers.

Throughout the book, a twelve-year-old boy loses his family and himself. Beah was easily manipulated into becoming a child soldier, just like so many other children. In the article, “Child Soldiers,” it summarizes how easily children can be manipulated during states of emergency, “Children are particularly susceptible to manipulation and forced recruitment due to their physical and emotional immaturity.” Being a young child during the Sierra Leone war made it easier to recruit them. All child soldiers are victims of a single story; manipulated into killing innocent people because of their emotional state and left to be discriminated against, like Ishmael

The major theme in the story A Long Way Gone is that with family and love a person can make it through anything. Overall Ishmael’s story is a very powerful, eye opening read; it informs people on a subject that some know little to nothing about, the civil war in Sierra Leone. Beah uses the theme of family and love, along with the use of symbolism and other literary devices, to inform a larger audience of the issues that he and others had to face while trying to survive in a war zone. A Long Way Gone, an autobiographical memoir, written by Ishmael Beah, takes place in Sierra Leone during the time of their civil war.

In the book “A Long Way Gone” Ishmael has to overcome his fears and desperation especially when he ends up in villages that dislike little kids because of the assumption that they are rebel soldiers. Sometimes he comes face to face with death like the time when some of the villagers who were suffering the civil war, capture Ishmael and his new accompanied friends they were saying ”We told him we were students and this was a big misunderstanding. The crowds shouted, drown the rebels”(Beah 38). When the village guards found a rap cassette in Ishmael's pocket they played the music and it pleased the chief and so they were excused from execution and as a result they were offered to also stay in the village for how long they wanted. This part in the story paves a path from Ishmael to talk and although that was one of his major obstacles pertaining to his life he succeeded and faced adversity by pleading that they were not rebels but

The quote shows the process of how Beah loses his innocence because of war, because it describes how the white sheet, the symbol of innocence, gets dirty from the blood of the dead body. Also when Ishmael sees his face in the body it shows his desperation from the war and his suffering. To conclude, the author believes that a kid should not suffer and lose their purity during war. This is seen through symbols in the memoir a Long Way Gone like the Ak-47, the baby and the white sheet.

He was faced with a choice to take on the rebels by himself and mostly likely be killed or join the army and become a child soldier. He choose to join the army which eventually made him lose his innocence. Many situations caused him to when Gasemu took him to see his family, when his music cassettes were burned, and when he first killed someone. Ishmael was looking for his family and by chance ran into a man from his old town named Gasemu who was currently in the

Ishmael was away from his family when the rebels (one side of the war) started to attack his home. Ishmael then had traveled city to city with groups of boys to avoid the rebels, and search for his family. The only thing that was getting Ishmael through the war was that he would see his family again. He couldn’t handle not knowing what had happened to his family so, “[he] decided to just ignore every thought that came to [his] head, because it brought too much sadness… [he] spent most of [his] time fighting [himself] mentally in order to avoid thinking about what [he] had seen or wondering where [his] life was going, where [his] family and friends were.

There are two key examples of this; the horrors of killing another human being, and witnessing the death of a close friend. After being forced to kill a French soldier, protagonist Paul Baumer is overcome with grief and remorse. He begins to think almost deliriously due to the trauma he experiences. Baumer, or perhaps it should be said Remarque, writes “My brain is taxed beyond endurance.... I have killed the printer, Gerard Duval.