De Niros Game

De Niros Game De Niros Game by Rawi Hage is a coming of age story about a boy named Bassam from fight torn Lebanon. The main settings are the headings of the three parts of the novel Roma, Beirut and Paris. The settings help to illustrate voice development, the novels themes and are correcttful emblems throughout. The commencement ceremony section of the novel is entitled Roma, but the events all occur in Beirut. Bassam never goes to Roma, however it is always present in the novel and an heavy symbol throughout. Roma is a place that Bassam has wanted to go his entire life.Roma symbolizes Bassams hope for a better life. He fantasizes that it is a perfect place, near a heaven. When a little girl from his neighborhood dies he says I went to the little girls funeral, the little girl who was on her way to Roma. pg. 25. turn visiting his friend George he says that they whispered conspiracies, exchanged money, drank beer, rolled hash in soft, white paper and I praised Roma. pg. 34. In the Roma section Bassam is young and more innocent than in the other sections. Bassam is still a petty criminal.He only commits small crimes such as vandalism and drug use. The fact that the first section is called Roma, yet it is not in Roma, is a form of foreshadowing, suggesting this fantasy may never become reality. The second part of the novel is called Beirut. This section is the good turn propose of Bassams life. In this section Bassam stops dreaming about Roma. Beirut symbolizes Bassams loss of innocence. He starts committing major crimes, such as murdering the militiaman Rambo. Bassam starts to run into about the brutality of the struggle and the slaughter being committed by the militia.Beirut is a symbol of the horror in the world. In Beirut, Bassam realizes how harsh reality and the war are. Soon after realizing this he says Ten thousand coffins had slipped underground and the living still danced above ground with firearms in their hands pg. 88. At one point Bassam says From the roof I could see West Beirut on fire. The Israelis bombarded the inhabitants for days, orange light glowed in the night, machine gun bullets left the ground and darted into the air in red arches. The city burned and drowned in sirens, loud blood and death pg. 163.Not only does Bassam learn about the horrific things going on in the war but he also witnesses his best friend George killing himself, because George cannot go on knowing that he has committed such heinous crimes against humanity. Because of the war Bassam is betrayed by his best friend, tortured by the militia for a crime he did not commit and is forced to realize that the militia and war are not good, but rather morally wrong and pointless. Part III, of the novel is called Paris. Bassam bunks from Beirut and goes to Paris searching for Georges father. After Bassam finds Georges family, they soon betray him.Paris is a symbol of Bassams complete and utter hopelessness. In Paris Bassam thinks I had no plans, and realized that I could not think of any. Other than Rhea, no one in Paris knew me, no one was expecting me for dinner, nor to walk in a funeral procession, nor to work, eat, carry the wounded, speed around on motorcycles pg. 215. He has almost no place in Beirut and even less of a place in Paris. Paris symbolizes that Bassam is ruined by the war in Lebanon. Bassam is an outsider in Paris because of his squirm morals and values that were corrupted due to the war.He reads The Outsider by Albert Camus, which talks about the meaninglessness of existence and realizes there are many similarities between him and the character in the book. No matter where he goes, Bassam will always be an outsider. Paris helps Bassam develop as a person, realizing that things are horrible everywhere, and he cannot escape his past. Near the end of the novel, Bassam says And so I drifted for hours, trying and failing to reconcile Paris with the phantasm of my youth, with the books I had read, with my teachers stories pg. 204. Bassam realizes Roma is a fantasy.Setting and place are alert literary devices in De Niros Game. The settings are linked to the themes, in that Beirut is a city done for(p) by war as Bassam is destroyed by war, and due to his journey through Paris he realizes his dreams of Roma are unattainable. The changes in setting also parallel and mark the stages of his coming of age. In Roma Bassam was a boy, in Beirut his transformation began and in Paris, Bassam became a man. While Bassam is in no way a perfect or even good person, he has made a transformation into adulthood. Without the setting his transformation into manhood would have been less clear and with