In Chapter Two, what kind of environment does the narrator create?

In Chapter Two, Beah's trifold world - past, present, and dreams - is created and it will continue to overlap throughout the book. Beah's primary emphasis is placed upon the past (which really forms the narrative's "present" throughout). His memories, usually in the form of dreams, will illustrate the horrors Beah encounters throughout his youth during the Sierra Leone civil war. In this chapter, we are introduced to the horrors of Beah's life as a boy soldier through the metaphorical language of dreams and as a past belonging to a different place and time, and thus physically separate from the Beah of the present. This serves to distance both Beah and the reader from the horrors which are about to be recounted, ironically making the full scope of the atrocities more comprehensible.