Companionship, Hope, and the Self Theme Analysis

In the face of so much horror, Beah’s will to live is tested. His hope that each new set of companions will be the one he gets to keep—the ones who will not leave him or be torn from him—allows him to keep moving forward, even as the evidence mounts against that hope with each loss.

Beah is separated from his family at the beginning of the memoir, fleeing the advancing rebels with a group of boys that includes his brother. The boys’ companionship often feels futile. There is no remedy for the horror the boys have seen, and their only option is to flee from it. More often than not, the boys do not speak at all. As Beah often notes, it is far more dangerous for the boys to travel together than it would be to be alone. They are often mistaken for child soldiers even though they are unarmed, and as a group they are far more conspicuous to the rebels. Yet they stick together, feeling that they could not keep on without each other’s companionship.

At one point, Beah is almost reunited with his family in a new village. He allows himself to hope that not only will he be reunited with them, but that his mother and father’s love for each other will have been rekindled. But just as he and the other boys are coming upon the village, he hears them being slaughtered. His hope that he might return to life as he once knew it is ruined. He goes so far as to say “I wanted to see my family, even if it meant dying with them.” His hope, at that point, is to die. When Beah is subsequently picked up by the army, he hopes again, in this case, that he might at least be safe. The army promptly betrays that hope by conscripting he and other boys into the war. Once the boys begin killing, they cannot imagine, or even hope for a life beyond the war. Their squad becomes a kind of terminal family and revenge a way of embracing despair. Without companionship, without hope, Beah loses himself.

Beah is mercifully taken from the front after two years, but he is so brainwashed he views his rehabilitation as another loss. The squad had, after all, had become his only family. He reacts violently to being put into what amounts in his mind to a prison by civilians. But as he readjusts to civilian life, he begins to see the staff as his new family. It is not by telling the boys that they are blameless that the staff gain their trust, but instead by giving them the affection any child would want. Beah comes to understand he is deserving of that affection, and even moves in with his father’s brother. He goes to the UN to speak on the behalf of child soldiers and makes friends who he will eventually run to when the war reaches Sierra Leone’s capital, Freetown.

And when it does, Beah loses his country. His uncle dies, and he flees for the border, leaving his old life behind. But by then he has seen enough, and seen enough of the world outside of Sierra Leone, that he does not lose hope, knowing that he has friends in the United States who he can reach out to.