Thematic Analysis of A Long Way Gone and Sold Anonymous 10th Grade

In many parts of the world, child exploitation is an everyday activity that causes many children to be taken away from their families and friends. Child exploitation occurs mostly in areas such as Asia and Africa, but modern authors have described its horrors for readers on all continents. In the novel Sold by Patricia McCormick, a young, thirteen year-old girl named Lakshmi was sold into prostitution in India due to her lack of knowledge of the outside world. In the memoir A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah, Ishmael was a twelve year-old child soldier in Sierra Leone who killed RUF rebels and plundered villages. Both Ishmael and Lakshmi faced difficulties that forced them to adapt to their violent and abusive situation in order to survive. Therefore, a theme that sustains both of the novels is that learning to adapt is necessary for survival during times of violence and abuse.

Lakshmi learns to adapt to prostitution during her times of abuse because she wanted survive; she becomes a prostitute in order to pay off her debt and she had to sleep with a large number of men. When Lakshmi was washing herself with a bucket of water, she realizes that “no matter how often I wash and scrub and wash and scrub, I cannot seem to rinse the...