why is chapter 2 significant in understanding the developmeny of beah as a person?

Beah opens this chapter by jumping in time past his experiences in the civil war. Beah's trifold world - past, present, and dreams - will continue to overlap throughout the book, with the primary emphasis placed upon the past (which really forms the narrative's "present" throughout). Memories, usually in the form of dreams, will mitigate the horrors Beah encounters throughout his youth during the Sierra Leone civil war. In the current chapter, however, the reader is simply 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.