Hope is essential to survival which is described in the novels Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah and Sold by Patricia McCormick. The novel Long Way Gone is a true story about Ishmael Beah. Ishmael became a forced child soldier during the civil war in Sierra Leone. His village was attacked when he was only 12 years of age. Ishmael, his brother, and his friends sauntered from village to village trying to get the daily essentials such as food and shelter. Every day was a struggle for surviving. He would think about his family and hope those days would come back to him. The novel Sold from Patricia McCormick is about a Nepali girl named Lakshmi that was sold into slavery at the age of 12. Lakshmi’s stepfather tells her to take the job in the city to …show more content…
When she reaches the Happiness House, she realizes that she has been sold into prostitution. At the happiness house, she would hope about the scent of Nepal and her family. She aspired to make her money and return home. Hope was an active element that drove them through the pain and sorrow.
In the novel Long Way Gone, Ishmael goes through a lot of pain but hopes that it will end someday. Hope gives the strength to believe that there will be a better day ahead. When Ishmael would feel down, he thought his father’s words which were “ If you are alive, there is hope for a better day and something good to happen. If there is nothing good left in the density of the person, he, or she will die” (54). This quote explains to Ishmael Beah that there will be a better day ahead of him. This inspired him to keep on moving forward. He gave Ishmael a hope to live. This was Ishmael Beah’s driving force that pushed him forward day by day because he was hoping for a
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She woke up realizing that there is one day less than yesterday. Lakshmi realizes that “all I know is that each time one leaves, my debt to Mumtaz grows a little smaller”(130). This expresses that after each day ends there is one less day that she will be in the tortuous house. This gave her hope to try with all her might every day so Lakshmi can get a lot of money which would lead her to return home. She kept an account of everything to calculate exactly how much time she would be there and try her hardest even though she hated doing it. This gave her hope to continue what she was doing and try harder. Lakshmi was always positive in every situation she had to face. In the novel Sold, it expresses that “if you look hard enough, chaos turns into the way letters turn into words”(76). This quote explains that she was positive in all situations. Even at the lowest point of time, she was optimistic and looked at the brighter side. She had the hope that one-day thing was turn to something good and life would get better, but she just has to try harder. She determined that she will work harder to achieve her goal which was to leave the brothel. Her main strength was having hope and being optimistic in every situation in faced in the
Hope has the incredible ability to make or break someone. People are always told to make large goals in school and employment, and try to reach those ambitions no matter how far they are. Hope is the motivation behind accomplishing dreams, but it also has the ability to break people who have hoped for something so desperately, yet never came to fruition. Only determination and personal situations can persuade hope to fly or fall. A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly highlights this ambiguous hope we depend on through the use of symbolism, characterization, and inner conflict.
“Hope is defined as the action of wishing or desiring that something will occur.” Hope helps people move forward in life to see what’s coming next for them. For example, “I had no right to let myself die. What would he do without me? I was his sole support” (Wiesel, “Night”.) This quote explains the effects of hope in a pitiful situation. Eliezer Wiesel and his father were torn apart, mentally and physically from everything they
Hope enables people to move on by providing the thought that maybe tomorrow’s events will be better than today’s. Hope is a theme that remains constant in every part of A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah. Ishmael begins the novel optimistic, believing he will find his family again. This optimism is later lost when Ishmael is recruited by the army to fight against the rebels, causing him to become addicted to drugs and the thrill of killing. Three years after his recruitment, Ishmael is rescued by UNICEF-a group dedicated to rehabilitating child soldiers. During his rehabilitation, Ishmael discovers hope once more by relearning how to trust, love, and have the will to survive. The presence of hope throughout A Long Way Gone enables Ishmael to have an ability to move on and a will to survive that he lacks when he loses hope.
Mumtaz, the ruler of the brothel, runs the house with brutality and a sense of street smart. Cheating Lakshmi of her paltry earnings, Mumtaz tells the girl she will never leave until she can pay off her family’s debts, which will never happen given the way the process is set up. She is living what is essentially enforced slavery. Despite her dire circumstances, Lakshmi continues to live by her mother’s words “simply to endure is to triumph” and slowly forms friendships with Shahanna and Anita who enable her to make it through her new struggles (McCormick 16). She learns to speak English from “this David Beckham boy” (McCormick 140). In time, Lakshmi meets a disguised Ame...
Hope can decide whether Mariam lives or dies each and every day. Hope keeps Mariam alive.“Laila has moved on. Because in the end she knows that’s all she can do. That and hope.”(pg 401) Even though Laila has already lost so much, her father and mother and almost lost the love of her life, she keeps on. She continues to wanting to make a difference all because of hope. Hope that she could do something good in this world of bad, with Rasheed and the war. Mariam has a much different interpretation of hope because her whole life she has has to endure.Mariam was taught from a young age to not have hope from her own mother. But when Mariam finds Laila beneath the rubble, she finds hope. Mariam saw Laila as a way to make a change for the better in her life of let-downs. If she can save Laila and her baby, her life was worth enduring all those years with Rasheed and the culba. “But the naming game involves only male names, because if it’s a girl, Laila has already named her.”(pg 367) This quote represents how Mariams hope in saving Laila and her baby(s) has paid off. In result of Mariam having hope that Laila and her will someday find reconciliation in their lives of hardship. Even though Mariam dies for the death of Rasheed, she still lives on like “A thousand splendid suns”(pg 313).
In “A Long Way Gone”, we follow a twelve-year-old African boy, Ishmael Beah, who was in the midst, let alone survived a civil war in Sierra Leone, that turned his world upside down. Ishmael was a kind and innocent boy, who lived in a village where everybody knew each other and happiness was clearly vibrant amongst all the villagers. Throughout the novel, he describes the horrific scenes he encounters that would seem unreal and traumatizing to any reader. The main key to his survival is family, who swap out from being related to becoming non-blood related people who he journeys with and meets along his journey by chance.
Hope is one of Faulkner's favorite spices for cooking his characters. It is perhaps the most human of all emotions in that it is fragile like the body, but at the same time all powerful like the spirit. Lena Grove and Byron Bunch both have an endless amount of hope for the same thing: love they have never received. Hope brought her from Alabama to Mississippi in search of her runaway Lucas. Likewise, hope will carry Byron wherever Lena goes until he can find her love.
A Long Way Gone, a book written by Ishmael Beah, is a memoir of his own struggle to survive during the civil war in Sierra Leone. A Long Way Gone was the first book Beah publish back in 2007, and has just recently published Radiance of Tomorrow in 2014. The True story of A Long Way Gone describes the life that Ishmael Beah was forced to face without the help of his family. The Title is appropriate because while facing all these challenges Beah changed drastically compared to the sweet child that he was at the start of the book. Beah becomes a long way gone from his younger days and becomes evil and vicious as the war comes to an end. I found A Long Way Gone to be a very interesting and intriguing read, due to the fact that once you started
This novel not just only uses figurative language to let the reader’s mind imagine, but it also includes strong word choice. In other words, I would recommend this novel to everyone with any interest because this book allows the audience to sympathize with the author as they read along. Survival, revenge, and family were important to Ishmael. Personally, I would have agreed to take the same actions as Ishmael did and you would too. No matter what choices you choose in life, it's up to you. Like one had said, “If you want to succeed as much as you want to breathe, you'll succeed.” Without the experiences and failures, there's no success, which Ishmael
Throughout the course of A Long Way Gone, we see Ishmael going through a number of hardships. Many people would consider these difficulties overwhelming, and near impossible to overcome. However, Ishmael shows resilience and overcomes hardships all through the book and displays the human condition through these complications in his life.
The theme of survival/resilience despite great suffering was shown throughout the book. Ishmael’s ventures from village to village while running away from the RUF, going through treacherous circumstances such as burning sand, angry citizens, and even
Mrs. Hopewell took pride in her daughter Joy. Joy was supposed to be Mrs. Hopewell’s happiness in life but it didn’t really turn out the way she expected. Everything that Mrs. Hopewe...
And though he experiences both sides of the paradox, it is ultimately the uplifting and inspiring effect of hope that pushes him to fight back against his oppression rather than continue to accept his enslavement. Grappling with hope and using it to move himself forward against overwhelming odds shows that even though it can be used to pacify people and keep them in their place, wishing for a rosy future that can never exist, it can also be the fire that motivates them to finally change their
Samuel Smiles, a Scottish author and government reformer, once stated, “Hope… is the companion of power, and the mother of success; for who so hopes has within him the gift of miracles.” Gerda Weissmann Klein, a Holocaust survivor, saw hope in people and her future of surviving. The theme in Gerda Weissmann Klein’s All But My Life illustrates how one can stay hopeful in a world full of mistreatment through the use of figurative language, internal monologue, and dialogue.
No matter how bad things may seem, there is always hope for things to ameliorate. When people believe that the future will be promising, they can have something to look forward to as opposed to dwelling on the past or the problems of the present. This hope can give a person a positive outlook on life and motivate him or her to look past what is happening in the present. In the poems “Hope is the Thing with Feathers” by Emily Dickinson and “The Darkling Thrush” by Thomas Hardy, they both convey similar messages about hope. Both works display the theme of hope being present at all times no matter how bad things may seem and is a consistent option for anyone in need of help.