How Ishmael Beah Lose Innocence

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The memoir, A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah is about a young boy, Ishmael Beah, who’s innocent childhood is robbed by a civil war taking place in Sierra Leone at the time. Ishmael Beah encounters new life events and experiences. Throughout the novel, he is constantly facing the denouements of the war. The main new event in his life is the civil war, because of the war he feels confused and overwhelmed. Upon encountering the civil war, Ishmael begins to lose his humanity and therefore he amounts to making awful decisions in order to survive. The civil war caused Ishmael to lose many things in his life including his childhood and innocence. Ishmael is twelve when he came face to face with war. He and a few of his friends, …show more content…
The civil war affected his way of thinking. As soon as he lost everything he had, he began to have no pity for anybody. He made a decision, to stop running from the war and to start fighting for it. He explains his experience of fighting for the army by saying, “Our innocence had been replaced by fear and we had become monsters”(Beah 55). In the beginning of the story his innocence had been taken away by the rebels and the gruesome aftermath of the war. Then their life had changed to doing whatever is possible to survive. The boys had been trained and manipulated to believe that killing the rebels was the right thing to do. Even though the army was doing exactly what the rebels were doing. The quote, indicates that in a matter of a few seconds things will change drastically and the way you act can also change. He was so riveted on his job as a soldier that he began to believe that his squad was his family, his gun was his provider and the forest became his home. After shooting his first soldier, he described killing as simple and quintessential as drinking water. It was only after, he realized how manipulated and brainwashed he
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