A Long Way Gone In Class Essay
Ishmael Beah, the author of a Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, has gotten himself in quite a predicament. Up until about 2008, Beah’s national bestseller is revered around the globe as one of the best memoirs of it’s time. Things changed when several The Australian’s reporters claimed that Beah’s story was folly and said there were multiple things wrong with his account on things – namely the timeline. In one instance, the reporters visited the school in Beah’s home in Sierra Leone in the article Beah’s credibility a long way gone. There, they interviewed several of his teachers and former pupils who insisted that Beah was present at the school throughout the years 1993 and 1994 which contradicts Beah’s…
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…
Yes, there is some evidence that points towards him lying, but the article Does Best-Seller Bend the Facts states that all of the inaccuracies in his story may be due to post-war trauma and all the drugs that Beah consumed during his time as a child soldier. Leslie Mboka, his former counselor at the rehabilitation center, said that it can be very difficult to keep a solid timeframe while going through all horrors of war, especially as a child. In my eyes, the facts in the timeline don’t matter because you can still relay a strong theme or message even when something is not a memoir. You see dozens of fiction books that have a strong message to them even if they are completely false. Because of this, I do not think that the validity of Beah’s memoir affects the overall…
