The Representation of Child Soldiers in Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation

This study examines the representation of child soldiers in Uzodinma Iweala's debut novel Beasts of No Nation, analysing the novel's literary strategies for rendering the psychological and moral experience of a child combatant in an unnamed West African conflict that resonates strongly with Nigerian and regional civil war histories. Child soldiering represents one of the most urgent humanitarian crises in contemporary West Africa, and its literary treatment raises complex questions about narrative voice, moral responsibility, and the limits of reader empathy. The study applies trauma theory and postcolonial ethics of representation to a close reading of Iweala's novel, focusing particularly on the author's deployment of a first-person child narrator who is simultaneously perpetrator and victim of violence. Analysis attends to Iweala's stylistic choices, including fragmented syntax, childlike vocabulary used to describe atrocity, and the gradual erosion of the narrator's pre-war identity as indices of psychological trauma. Findings reveal that the novel's narrative form is its primary ethical strategy: by restricting the reader's access to events through the consciousness of a child unable to fully comprehend his own victimisation, Iweala prevents the aestheticisation of violence while maintaining proximity to his protagonist's suffering. The study argues that Beasts of No Nation makes an important contribution to the literary ethics of representing children in conflict. Recommendations include the use of the novel in undergraduate courses on conflict literature alongside Nigerian civil war texts. Keywords: child soldiers, trauma narrative, Uzodinma Iweala, postcolonial fiction, West Africa.