we flash forward to Ishmael’s new life in New York City. He relates a dream of pushing a wheelbarrow. What is in the wheelbarrow, and where is he pushing it? How does the dream reflect Ishmael’s personal struggles even after fleeing Sierra Leone?
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Beah opens this chapter by jumping in time past his experiences in the civil war. In his dream, he is a hardened soldier, inured to death. The change in Beah is jarring compared to the optimistic boy of Chapter 1. The dream image of Beah pushing his own corpse in the wheelbarrow foreshadows the death of his youthful innocence when he acts in accordance with his commanding officer's order to kill a prisoner. He finds himself the agent of his own symbolic death and with that knowledge must deal with the attenuating grief.
Beah's trifold world - past, present, and dreams - will continue to overlap throughout the book, with the primary emphasis placed upon the past (which really forms the narrative's "present" throughout). Memories, usually in the form of dreams, will mitigate the horrors Beah encounters throughout his youth during the Sierra Leone civil war.