Fact, Fiction, and Truth in Narrative Accounts of Child Soldier

This thesis explores the effects of war trauma on the developmental lives of children asseen through both the Civil Wars in Yugoslavia and Sierra Leone. In Sara Nović’s novel Girl at War and Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, both authors explore the impacts of war on a child's psyche. While Nović’s book is a fictional account of a child soldier, the author’s attention to truth in essence makes it a meaningful depiction of war trauma and the road to resilience. Beah’s memoir recounts his own lived experience fighting for the Sierra Leone military, and his account depicts the child soldier experience through a lens of historicity and apathy. The tension between these two texts and their respective genres demonstrates the complexity of the child soldier phenomenon and substantiates the refusal to place the child soldier as either a passive victim or a political actor.