A Long Way Gone: Text to Society Connection

     In the novel, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, a child by the name of Ishmael Beah is forced to flee his home town of Mogbwemo as rebel soldiers decimate towns all over Sierra Leone. Ishmael eventually becomes an unwilling boy soldier, After his village in Sierra Leone is attacked, Ishmael and his brothers go wandering from village to village in search of food but eventually are found and forced to become soldiers in the child army. They become ruthless killing machines and adapt an addiction to various drugs. Eventually Ishmael's Lieutenant in the child army turns them over to UNICEF, a program which was currently focusing on restoring child soldier's lives to normal as best as possible, and they go to America for their rehabilitation process.

View the following link for a complete summary of the novel and an autobiography of Ishmael Beah:
                                             http://www.alongwaygone.com/index.html

     But more importantly, we will analyze how the central idea of persevering to overcome struggles and how it played a part in both A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier and our current day society. In the novel A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah, this idea is everpresent supported by the following quote from page 146, " We flipped the bodies over and took their ammunition and guns. I was not afraid of these lifeless bodies. I despised them and kicked them to flip them" (Beah 146). This quote depicts Ishmael's loss of his humanity in the sense that after joining the child army he was brainwashed into not having any compassion for anyone, and therefore didn't regard the death of a human, of much importance.

     Similarly in an Article by the Chicago Tribune titled: With perseverance, Haitian immigrant's dream comes true, it tells of a Haitian boy who moved to the United States by knew no English. Initially he had no means of communicating with anyone but his sister so he had to work jobs that required intense manual labor. However that all changed quickly for Jude Registre. He went to school and learned English. Now he is a junior in college aspiring to become a bio-medical engineer or doctor. He too had persevere to overcome the struggle of not being able to communicate with others but after he did so his life changed for the better and he became a normal American citizen.
                                            View the following link for the complete article:
      http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2003-12-19/news/0312190360_1_haitian-immigrant-english