First they killed my father - Essay Example

The memoir named ‘first they killed my father’ presents to the reader the history of khamer rouge terror in Cambodia through the story of a little girl from Phnom Penh who expresses the story in dreams and nightmares. In the beginning of the story, loung belongs to a family of three sisters and three brothers and life seems to be in good shape. Their father works in a good government office and their family is wealthy. In the whole book, the writer uses the theme of dreams and nightmares to bring out the clear insight in the understanding of ‘the terrible descent the family makes during and after the revolution in Cambodia’.

She explains the experiences of her life as a child with minimal exaggeration and hence brings out the picture of the situation perfectly. During this period, the government is overthrown, their life gets to a turning point and the family is forced to move to a camp where they live with food rations and fear. Loung begins expressing the situation by a dream about food on New Year’s Eve and imagines about the death of a teenager named keav and dreams about the coming back of her Pa. In her dream, she views herself sitting alone on a table that is filled with all the types of foods she desires but she says she is afraid that the Khmer soldiers will take her food away(Ung,2000).

In this dream, she passes the knowledge that in this period, the issue of food shortage is rampant and she explains that there are many deaths due to starvation. This kind of information from the memoir takes the readers emotion making the source more effective since the knowledge is more memorable (Howell & Prevenier, 2011). The memoir is written from the first person perspective and she draws the reader’s attention by the way she describes the struggles and pains that her family is going through.

Memoirs can therefore be a good source of historical information since the person describes situations that