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A Long Way Gone
One instance when a group of adult men make the boys an offer occurs when they are appointed to be child soldiers. When Ishmael and his friends make their way back to their village, they are...
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A Long Way Gone
In Ishmael Beah's 2007 memoir A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, he tells the story of how he became separated from his family as a young boy in Sierra Leone during the country's civil war....
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A Long Way Gone
Chapter 7 of A Long Way Gone begins with the rebel attack on Kamator. While at one point most of the people of the village had been expecting an attack to occur, they had let their guard down....
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A Long Way Gone
Chapter 13 of A Long Way Gone deals with the boys' introduction to actual combat. We see here just how they are turned from boys into mindless killers. Ishmael and the others have just finished up...
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A Long Way Gone
When we meet Ishmael in chapter 10, he and his friends have traveled to a number of different villages, where they experience a great sense of hospitality and a respite from the violence of war....
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A Long Way Gone
Chapter 14 Beah usually suffers from extreme migraines but notices that the pain dulls as he begins to focus on the violence and lifestyle associated with being a boy soldier. He and his fellow...
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A Long Way Gone
When chapter 14 begins, Ishmael Beah has become a functioning unit within the group of boy soldiers. In large part because he has become addicted to the “white capsules” and is often high on...
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A Long Way Gone
The central idea running throughout chapters 15 to 17 is that Ishmael's PTSD debilitated him psychologically, emotionally, and physically, and as if from the inside out. For example, in chapter 15,...
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A Long Way Gone
One event that had a major impact on Ishmael Beah was the Revolutionary United Front’s raid on Mogbwemo, his home village in Sierra Leone. Although he and several friends were outside the village...
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A Long Way Gone
Ishmael Beah ends with the story of the hunter and the monkey to leave his audience with a vivid image of sacrifice and a lesson on how to end repetitive violence. It leaves a lasting image in a...
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A Long Way Gone
Family, choice, innocence and manipulation are all important themes in Ishmael Beah’s memoir. Family is significant as a strong influence in Beah's early life, and their influence gives him...
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A Long Way Gone
One allusion that appears in the first chapter of A Long Way Home is Ishmael’s reference to one of the Rambo films. He mentions that at age ten, he had seen and heard survivors from the war zones...
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A Long Way Gone
In A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, Ishmael, his brother Junior, and their friend Talloi travel to Mattru Jong to perform a dancing and rapping act. Their decision to travel without...
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A Long Way Gone
The title of Beah's memoir A Long Way Gone refers to the rocky journey that Beah has taken as a former child soldier. He is forced into the army so that he can survive, and the lessons that he...
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A Long Way Gone
Chapter 2 begins with one of Ishmael’s nightmares. He did not see the attack on his own village, but nonetheless has nightmares about it. In the nightmare, Ishmael sees dead, “mangled bodies,” with...
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A Long Way Gone
An overwhelming irony surrounds the death of Ishmael Beah's family in A Long Way Gone. All the while that Beah spends on the run, he desperately wants to find his family. In every village that he...
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A Long Way Gone
Love is actually a difficult emotion for Beah to display within the confines of A Long Way Gone. I say this to emphasize the fact that Beah himself certainly appears to be a loving person, but...
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A Long Way Gone
In A Long Way Gone, Ishmael Beah uses recurring symbols to represent oppression and freedom. For example, fire and smoke are often literally and figuratively associated with the oppression that...
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A Long Way Gone
A detailed description of each of 21 chapters is not possible within the confines of this format. What follows is an attempt at providing some details. Chapter 1: Ishmael’s childhood, beginning at...
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A Long Way Gone
Many people are ignorant to the fact that children are still used in gruesome manners that have been long outlawed in other countries. Children who are forced in labor, used as slaves, and driven...
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A Long Way Gone
A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier traces the activities of Ishmael Beah, the author, as he tries to survice war-torn Sierra Leone before escaping and making his way to America at only 18...
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A Long Way Gone
Determining the tone of a literary work requires you to think about what the author's attitude or opinion is of the topic. The best way to analyze tone is to review the chapters mentioned and look...
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A Long Way Gone
It is in chapter 8 of Ishmael Beah's memoir A Long Way Gone that we find the fable about the wild pig hunter. Prior to this chapter, Beah and his friends had escaped their village of Mogbwemo that...
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A Long Way Gone
Ishmael Beah's novel A Long Way Gone opens when the protagonist is ten years old and completely innocent about the destructive nature of the civil war moving inexorably towards his village,...
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A Long Way Gone
Ishmael Beah's memoir is a chilling account of his days as a child soldier and his struggle to return from a personal hell. His story is presented through the description of his three worlds: his...
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A Long Way Gone
Perhaps the writer of the introduction for an essay on A Long Way Gone may wish to capitalize upon the significance of the book's title and irony of its author's name. For Ishmael Beah, like...
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A Long Way Gone
In Chapter Eight, Ishmael is on the run after a rebel attack destroys the village of Kamator and scatters the remaining villagers who manage to escape execution. As Ishmael makes his way west, he...
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A Long Way Gone
The formidable amount of stress caused in war makes it difficult to remember details from wartime experiences correctly. In no way would the inability to fully recall all wartime experiences...
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A Long Way Gone
Throughout his memoir A Long Way Gone, Beah demonstrates courage, determination, and strength through his responses to the hardships which befall him. For example, at the beginning of the book,...
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A Long Way Gone
In A Long Way Gone, Ishmael Beah describes several friendships that he had as a young boy before he became a child soldier. He had friends in his home village before it was raided, and he ran with...
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A Long Way Gone
In my mind, I think that the plight of child soldiers in Sierra Leone, or anywhere, is probably some of the most convincing evidence that globalization is uneven. The information superhighway as...
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A Long Way Gone
In A Long Way Gone, Ishmael Beah is finally put into rehabilitation, but he and the other boys do not take to it easily. The boys have been exposed to harsh drugs for so long that it is not easy...
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A Long Way Gone
In Chapter 12 of A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah, Beah and the friends with whom he has been traveling are taken in from the forest by a group of government soldiers. They are led to a village...
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A Long Way Gone
In A Long Way Gone, Beah's main focus is the struggle to survive as a child soldier. Beah, about to be reunited with his family, witnesses the burning of a village and there is no trace of his...
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A Long Way Gone
I would say that one way in which Beah is contributing to the community is through his efforts to make the world aware of the plight of child soldiers. Beah has not retreated into a sanctuary of...
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A Long Way Gone
A Long Way Gone is Ishmael Beah's firsthand account of life as a child soldier in the army during Sierra Leone's brutal civil war against militant rebels in the 1990s. He was trained to use an...
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A Long Way Gone
In A Long Way Gone, Ishmael Beah devotes significant attention to nature. He has been taught to pay attention to nature and to learn from it. He has grown up hearing his elders tell him that...
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A Long Way Gone
In Ishmael Beah's memoir A Long Way Gone, family plays an important role. Ishmael recounts his experiences amid violence in his homeland of Sierra Leone. Ishmael, just twelve years old, travels to...
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A Long Way Gone
A Long Way Gone is actually autobiographical non-fiction rather than a work of fiction, and thus critics will usually not use the term plot in discussing the main events of the work. Instead, it’s...
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A Long Way Gone
The original question had to be edited. I think that Beah's life in the exposition of the memoir is steeped in this idea of innocence. The fact that he seems to be a "regular" adolescent helps to...