Leaving Home: Bassam's Search For Freedom

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Leaving Home: Bassam’s search for Freedom Rawi Hage’s De Niro’s Game is a tale of two young men who have been friends since their childhood days. The narrator Bassam and his friend George have been influenced by the longtime civil war of Lebanon and now are faced with life changing decisions that lead to them being alienated from each other. George thrives in the criminal activities, corruption of the Christian militia and the huge drug trade. George feels alive when he is in the center of the chaos that surrounds them. Bassam struggles everyday to find a way to leave the horror that has become his homeland. Tempted by the money that can be retrieved through criminal activity, Bassam gets caught up in a series of little jobs that lead him into fighting for his life., Bassam, unlike George, does not thrive in this type of behaviour, instead we see a young man who struggles with the inner conflicts and emotions of feeling abandoned by all sense of humanity and desires to find the element of peace that he sees within the images of Roma. Bassam’s inner turmoil is what causes him to leave Beirut in search of a better life. He desires security in his life, a sense of belonging and a new beginning, which Bassam is not receiving in Beirut. The disaster and devastation, emotional exile and the search for an ending are all the reasons to why Bassam has to leave his homeland. Bassam is surrounded by devastation and disaster everyday due to the civil war. This disaster begins to weigh on a person’s point of view as well as their behaviour towards others within their life and community. Bassam describes the way his neighbourhood has fallen apart due to the bombs: “Heat descended, bombs landed, and thugs jumped the long lines for bread, stole the food of the weak, bullied the baker and caressed his daughter. Thugs never waited in line” (12). No one

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