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Chinua achebe things fall apartclan view
Basic text: Okonkwo's character in few words
Okonkwo's character analysis
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Okonkwo’s suicide is said to have been sealed from the beginning. In ”Things Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe we find out that Okonkwo’s priority in life is to be better than everybody else and especially better than his own father. He always aimed for the highest status and to be considered brave, but with an angry personality and the fear of feeling powerless like his father, he took his own life.
The way Okonkwo was and how he was raised formed his personaliy and his angry way of behaving. He did not have a father to look up to but rather one he did not want to be associated with. Okonkwo tried unberably hard not to turn out the way his father did because he was concidered lazy and owed a lot of people money. Okonkwo wanted to be the opposite, he wanted to be a strong man, having everything in his control with many wives and titles. He wanted to be liked and to be a big man. He thought that if he would not be a big man he would have turned out the way his father did.
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Therefor it was very important to have many wives because that meant that you had accomplished plenty of things in life and you were considered manly and strong. With Okonkwo’s will to be the greatest, manliest and strongest he tried his hardest to become a leader so that he had everything in control. If he would loose control he would feel powerless and unworthy like his father, witch was everything he worked
Within the Obi tribe, Okonkwo is an important man, who has risen from nothing to a man of great wealth and social status. Okonkwo is obsessed with masculinity, and he has a very narrow view of “manliness”. Okonkwo's relationship with his dead father is the root of his violent and ambitious conduct. He wants to rise above his father's legacy of laziness, which he views as weak and therefore feminine. This drive and fierce pride made him a great man, but they are also the source of all of his faults.
In Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, there are many characters with varying responses to the clash of cultures between the white culture and the Ibo culture. Okonkwo is one of the characters that had a strong negative response. Okonkwo responded negatively and therefore divided himself from the tribe who was not ready to go to war, because he did not adapt like everyone else who was exposed to the culture when he was not. His distaste for the white man’s religion grows as it takes in converts and disrespects Okonkwo’s religion.
In Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe writes how the arrival of the Christian missionaries in Umuofia intensify Okonkwo's internal conflict between changing as a new person and commit to the new changes by following the missionaries religion (which in the Igbo culture, it’s consider as being weak) vs. going his own way and follow the Igbo religion and be "manly". Okonkwo was a respected and honored man who had a lot of prosperity, but sadly his choice at the end of the book was to commit suicide. His choice had an negative impact on his clan because people look up to Okonkwo as an exemplary to the Igbo clan. Okonkwo find himself unable to adapt to the changing times as the white man comes to live among the Umuofians. As it becomes clear that you need to change to adapt to the changing society or fight for how it was before, Okonkwo realizes that he no longer can compliance the missionaries’ regulations and can’t do nothing about it, realize he can no longer can be able to function within his changing society.
Okonkwo, the main character of the book, was born the son of Unoka, who was a loafer. Unoka was too lazy to go out and plant crops on new, fertile land, and preferred to stay at home playing his flute, drinking palm wine, and making merry with the neighbors. Because of this, his father never had enough money, and his family went hungry. He borrowed much money in order to maintain this lifestyle. Okonkwo perceived this as an imbalance toward the female side in his father's character: staying at home and not using one's strength to provide for the family is what the women do. In reaction, Okonkwo completely rejected his father, and therefore the feminine side of himself. He became a star wrestler and warrior in his tribe and began providing for his family at a very young age, while at the same time starting new farms and beginning to amass wealth. He is very successful, and soon becomes one of the leaders of his tribe and has many wives and children. His big ambition is to become one of the powerful elders of the tribe, for what could be more manly than that?
His constant fight of not being like his father sets him up for failure. While Okonkwo constantly fights to not be like his father he mirrors some of his father's characteristics. Before Okonkwo kills himself he loses his possessions, title, and clan, his father did not have any real possessions or a title. Then he kills himself which is not masculine and is called a agbala which his father was known as. All of Okonkwo’s hard work and attention to details does nothing for him but end up like Unoka who he strived untiring to not even be seen as
of his final action: suicide. Due to this fact, Okonkwo can never be a true tragic he-
Okonkwo is often described as being similar to characters in Greek tragedies. Okonkwo knew that the end of his clan was coming, and that they would do nothing to prevent it from happening. He took his life out of desperation. He had struggled his whole life to become a respected member of his community, and suddenly his world is turned upside down and changed forever because of an accident. Okonkwo sees that he is fighting a losing battle, so he quits. Suicide was one of the biggest offenses that could be committed against the earth, and Okonkwo?s own clansmen could not bury him. Okonkwo?s death symbolizes the end of patriarchy in Umuofia. The last page of the book is from the point of view of the white Commissioner, who notes that he wants to include a paragraph on Okonkwo?s life in his book entitled The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of Lower Niger. Okonkwo?s struggles, triumphs and defeats are all reduced to a paragraph, much like his culture and society will be reduced.
Okonkwo is “a man of action, a man of war” (7) and a member of high status in the Igbo village. He holds the prominent position of village clansman due to the fact that he had “shown incredible prowess in two intertribal wars” (5). Okonkwo’s hard work had made him a “wealthy farmer” (5) and a recognized individual amongst the nine villages of Umuofia and beyond. Okonkwo’s tragic flaw isn’t that he was afraid of work, but rather his fear of weakness and failure which stems from his father’s, Unoka, unproductive life and disgraceful death. “Perhaps down in his heart Okonkwo was not a cruel man. But his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and weakness….It was not external but lay deep within himself. It was the fear of himself, lest he should be found to resemble his father.” Okonkwo’s father was a lazy, carefree man whom had a reputation of being “poor and his wife and children had just barely enough to eat... they swore never to lend him any more money because he never paid back.” (5) Unoka had never taught Okonkwo what was right and wrong, and as a result Okonkwo had to interpret how to be a “good man”. Okonkwo’s self-interpretation leads him to conclude that a “good man” was someone who was the exact opposite of his father and therefore anything that his father did was weak and unnecessary.
From birth Okonkwo had wanted his son, Nwoye, to be a great warrior like him. His son instead rebelled and wanted to be nothing like Okonkwo. Okonkwo would not change so that his son would idolize him, as he had wanted since his son's birth. He chose not to acknowledge his son's existence instead. This would weigh heavily on anyone's conscience, yet Okonkwo does not let his relationship with his son affect him in the least bit.
Okonkwo is not all that he may seem; as there is more than what meets the eye. Okonkwo is the primary protagonist within the book Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. Okonkwo is a cruel yet kind man who has everything yet has nothing, which in turn creates a sympathetic character. A character such as Okonkwo has many facets; or masks if you will. Then we have his many influences: the Ibo culture; his father Unoka and of course his own personality. Then there is a staggering list of achievements. Okonkwo is a strong character but thinks only inwardly - especially towards his father - which will be discussed further in this essay.
Their beliefs are completely opposite each other because of Okonkwo's need to fulfill his own pressures and ideal image, which he burdens himself with. Certain characteristics he holds which his father does not is seriousness, determination, and brutality. Okonkwo cannot move on from his past, instead he forces his future to be effected by his past, which results in his emotional separation from others around him. Oknonkwo describes his father as "lazy, improvident and quite incapable of thinking about tomorrow.
Okonkwo’s father was a man who was not looked up to through out the village. This was because he was a man who was lazy and would not think of the future. On page 3 it is stated, ‘In his day he was lazy and improvident and was quite incapable of think about tomorrow.’ As a result of Unoka’s lifestyle, Okonkwo despises a lazy lifestyle. Okonkwo’s life is all about hard work and never failing. As it is quoted, ‘He had no patience with unsuccessful men. He had no patience with his father’ (Page 3). Okonkwo had an obsession with working and never giving up. He would work all day until he made sure all tasks were complete before he would go and rest. Page 11 explains, ‘During the plant season Okonkwo worked daily on his farm from cockcrow until the chickens went to roost.’ As it is visible in many sections of this book, Okonkwo has a fear of becoming a failure and this causes him to work as hard as he can. As it is stated above, Okonkwo had no patience with his father, which was due to his fear. Quote: ‘But his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness.’ Okonkwo’s fear of becoming like his father wa...
Because Okonkwo did not want to follow in his father’s footsteps as a lazy, gentle, and poor man, he decided to create his own legacy. Some may consider this honorable; but as Okonkwo’s character evolves, it is clear that he is crippled by his own desire to escape his father’s shadow. He envisioned his father as weak but his own mindset in turn has weakened him in many areas. This is the narrative in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. The generational traits impact the characterizations of each individual in such a profound way. Okonkwo may have hated the legacy his father left behind but there was no where for him to run away from the bloodline that flowed so heavily through him.
Okonkwo was ashamed of him and did everything possible to never end up like his father. When the narrator stated, “With a father like Unoka, Okonkwo did not have the start in life which many young men had. But he threw himself into it like one possessed. And indeed he was possessed by the fear of his father’s contemptible life and shameful death” (pg. 18). The.
Suicide is regarded as a grave sin and a shameful way of dying, and any man who commits suicide is seen as a failure and a failure. Okonkwo is just that: a failure and a weakness. Okonkwo spends his whole life trying to be seen as a success and continuously performs acts of strength, even though he sometimes has to pay a price for it. In the end he pays the highest price of all, which is his life, and all his efforts to be successful become useless. He is now a shame and a failure in the eyes of his clan, just as his father had been.