Gabriel Mitchell

Mr. Dumas
Honors English 12
December 20, 2015
The second to last Paragraph on page 154
In the passage, the author Ishmael Beah uses the techniques of imagery,
personification, connotation, and sentence structure to convey that the past will
always find a way back into our lives and comfort us. In the beginning of the book
Beah was enamored with hip hop music and its culture. He was so infatuated with
how fast the people could speak with the rhythm. When his nurse, Esther, gave him
the Walkman and the headphones, the first thing he hears is Its like that from
Run-D.M.C. When Beah heard that he began to feel more relaxed with Esther and
started to open up to her. The music from his past came into his current reality
which triggered a comforting effect on him.
That effect was illustrated by Esther, when she examined Ishmaels leg and
saw his scars. Beah used imagery and connotation showing that there is a
painful/damaging connotation towards scars and the imagery picturing the scars on
Beahs leg. Seeing those scars showed, in a snapshot, of the war and what it was
like. Esther asked how he got the scars and he said Bullet wounds in a casual
response. The words Bullet wounds have a violent and dark connotation but
casually kind of contradict the effect of the connotation and so you can see how the
music has a comforting effect and comes from his past. Ishmael stated that the
song had taken over me which he is using personification to show how when he
first listen to the song he captured by it, enamored, and it brought him back to a

simpler time in his life without the all the physical and emotional pain he has been
dealing with over the years.
Beah also used parallel structure when he listed off the things when Esther
asked him to take my shirt, stood on the scale, and she checked my tongue. Beah
was also listening to music at the same time this was happening. Before this
happened he would resist her examination and have serious trust issues with her.
The music calmed him down to a mental place similar to wear he was at when he
first liked hip hop and was able to let Esther examine him.