Essay --

Amanda Korah P.1/Gwizdala February 26th, 2013 A Long Way Gone In Class Essay A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah is a memoir of a young, emotionally distraught child soldier who takes his audience through his mental and physical journey to his eventual escape of the Civil War in Sierra Leone. For the past few days, our World Literature class have been trying to figure out/argue what category A Long Way Gone falls under. In Tim O'Brien's book, The Things They Carried, he distinguishes between two types of stories: (1) stories that need to be real and (2) stories that rely on the emotional truth. To me, A Long Way Gone is a novel that relies on the emotional truth and should be read as such; it relies on the emotions of human beings for the story to be understood as it was written by a boy like one of us. Initially I was not sure what the emotional truth was, so I googled the definition and got that, â€Å"an emotional truth is writing in such a way that readers not only learn the facts of an event, but can feel the joy, sorrow, anger, envy, love, hate, poigna ncy that the participant feels.† And I believe that a story that relies on the emotional truth is not any less significant than stories that strictly state the truth. A story told using emotional truth/validity is a story that, in my opinion, offers more of the real picture than that of a story that doesn’t tug on the emotions of a reader and just blatantly state the true happenings of an event. I’ve come to terms that there is a possibility of a stretch in truth in A Long Way Gone. Listening to the arguments made throughout the discussion, there is evidence out there to counter some of the statements made by Ishmael Beah in his memoir (i.e. Being a child soldier in 1995 ... ...ay because we are emotionally vulnerable beings who respond more to emotions rather than the real situation. We believe everything is ok when someone expresses happiness, and we think things are going bad if someone expresses sorrow. We acknowledge situations, and we react to the emotions felt about a particular situations, which is why Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone is categorized as a story of emotional truth, it relies on our emotions to bring awareness to not only his life experiences but problems that went on in the world, and problems that still may be going on in the world. We must view this emotional truth story as valid as one that tells us a straight up truth, the reason why this book was made an emotional truth is so that we have a better understanding (and we understand better) about our surroundings, in a way that we would understand to the fullest.