The book entitled “A Long Way Gone” written by Ishmael Beah shows the reader a lot about keys to survival. It is an autobiography about Ishmael’s life. Ishmael is the main character, a teenage boy who grew up amidst the Sierra Leonean war. He experiences horrible things that many of us in Canada could not begin to imagine, such as Ishmael’s many brushes with death as well as his experiences as a child soldier. This book can teach the reader a lot about what is required to survive in situations that seem nearly impossible to make it out of. This book also serves as an inspiration, as it shows that anyone can make it through the toughest of times. During the book, Ishmael uses a variety of coping mechanisms to help him survive the situation.
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Hope is one of the most powerful things in the world, and is crucial to survival. Without hope, all is lost as you have no desire left to live. Hope is what creates that desire for survival. That is to say, that if one had no hope, one would not want to survive, and therefore would perish. Any type of hope can help a person survive, even if that hope happens to be false. Near the beginning of the novel, Ishmael acknowledges false hope, and just how much that false hope can help someone escape a dangerous situation. “Perhaps it was necessary that he cling to false hopes, since they kept him running away from harm” (Beah, 13), is what Ishmael thinks when he sees a father running away from the rebels while carrying his son in his arms. However Ishmael fails to recognize his own false hopes in the idea that his family was still all alive and well. This false hope is what kept him going throughout the tough situations he was placed in. Once Ishmael discovered his hopes were in fact false and that his family had died, his mental health and spirit declined rapidly. He turned into a machine who simply wanted to survive, nothing more. He did what he was told and seemingly turned his independent thoughts off. He reverted to unhealthy and unsafe coping mechanisms, and ultimately lost his humanity. Ishmael proves to himself just how powerful hope can be, without even realizing it. If Ishmael would not have had the hope of his family being alive, he would have turned into an inhumane machine he had become much earlier, and the damage caused by this would have been
Hope is one of the most powerful things in the world, and is crucial to survival. Without hope, all is lost as you have no desire left to live. Hope is what creates that desire for survival. That is to say, that if one had no hope, one would not want to survive, and therefore would perish. Any type of hope can help a person survive, even if that hope happens to be false. Near the beginning of the novel, Ishmael acknowledges false hope, and just how much that false hope can help someone escape a dangerous situation. “Perhaps it was necessary that he cling to false hopes, since they kept him running away from harm” (Beah, 13), is what Ishmael thinks when he sees a father running away from the rebels while carrying his son in his arms. However Ishmael fails to recognize his own false hopes in the idea that his family was still all alive and well. This false hope is what kept him going throughout the tough situations he was placed in. Once Ishmael discovered his hopes were in fact false and that his family had died, his mental health and spirit declined rapidly. He turned into a machine who simply wanted to survive, nothing more. He did what he was told and seemingly turned his independent thoughts off. He reverted to unhealthy and unsafe coping mechanisms, and ultimately lost his humanity. Ishmael proves to himself just how powerful hope can be, without even realizing it. If Ishmael would not have had the hope of his family being alive, he would have turned into an inhumane machine he had become much earlier, and the damage caused by this would have been