One of the most commonly asked questions about the novel Things Fall Apart is: why did Achebe choose a tragic hero, Okonkwo, as the main character in the story. According to Nnoromele, “A hero, in the Igbo cultural belief system, is one with great courage and strength to work against destabilizing forces of his community, someone who affects, in a special way, the destinies of others by pursuing his own. He is a man noted for special achievements. His life is defined by ambivalence, because his actions must stand in sharp contrast to ordinary behavior”(Nnoromele). In my opinion, he chose this type of hero to show the correlation between Okonkwo’s rise and fall in the Igbo society to the rise and fall of the Igbo culture itself. Many commentators have come up with various reasons for Okonkwo’s failure in the novel. Some say that it is just his chi that causes him to be a failure; however others believe it is because he is incapable of dealing with his culture deteriorating before his eyes. In Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo’s character as a tragic hero is a result of his chi, inability to cope with the destruction of the Igbo culture, and ultimately, his own suicide.
First of all, I feel that one of the main reasons why Okonkwo is considered a tragic hero is due to the weakness of his chi. His chi plays an important role in the novel because, according to Igbo culture, every time something goes wrong it is a result of bad chi. Throughout the beginning of Things Fall Apart Okonkwo seems to be one with his chi and everything seems to be going well. From the beginning the reader is meant to think that Okonkwo can overcome anything that he faces and this his chi is quite heroic up to this point in the story(Friesen).This i...
... middle of paper ...
...art, but in my opinion these are the most influential.
Works Cited
Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. Anchor Books. New York, 1994. Print.
Criswell, Stephen. "Okonkwo As Yeatsian Hero: The Influence of W. B. Yeats on Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart." The Literary Criterion 30.4: 1-14. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 127. Detroit: Gale Group, 2000. Literature Resource Center. Web. 8 Apr. 2010.
Friesen, Alan R. "Okonkwo's Suicide as an Affirmative Act: Do Things Really Fall Apart?" Postcolonial Text 2.4 (2006): 1-11. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 278. Detroit: Gale, 2010. Literature Resource Center. Web. 8 Apr. 2010.
Nnoromele, Patrick C. “The Plight of A Hero in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart [1].” College Literature 27.2 (2000): 146. Literature Resource Center. Web. 25 Mar. 2010.
Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. 1958. The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, Expanded Edition, Vol. 1. Ed. Maynard Mack. London: Norton, 1995.
Okpewho, Isidore. Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart: A Casebook. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Print.
In Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo is a tragic hero. Aristotle’s Poetics defines a Tragic Hero as a good man of high status who displays a tragic flaw (“hamartia”) and experiences a dramatic reversal (“peripeteia”), as well as an intense moment of recognition (“anagnorisis”). Okonkwo is a leader and hardworking member of the Igbo community of Umuofia whose tragic flaw is his great fear of weakness and failure. Okonkwo’s fall from grace in the Igbo community and eventual suicide, makes Okonkwo a tragic hero by Aristotle’s definition.
Nnolim, Charles E. "Achebe's Things Fall Apart: An Igbo National Epic" Modern Black Literature. ed. Okechukwu Mezu New York: Black Academy Press, 1971, 55-60.
Both characters have life goals before the fall. “In Things Fall Apart, Achebe makes it clear that Okonkwo’s single passion was ‘to become one of the lords of the clan’. According to Achebe, it was Okonkwo’s ‘life spring.’ Okonkwo wanted to be a hero,” claims Nnoromele (41). In becoming a great man and hero he must overcome the shame his father has left upon him. His father was lazy and had no titles. This helps motivate him on the road to heroism.
The book Things Fall Apart , by Chinua Achebe , is very similar to the poem , The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats.
Is Okonkwo a tragic hero? To answer that question one must start by defining the term 'tragic hero' first introduced by Aristotle. Aristotle defined a tragic hero simply as being a character fulfilling three different requirements. The character must be larger than life, and must have a high social standing. The character must also have ordinary human qualities, and must have a tragic flaw that leads to his downfall. In Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, all these characteristics are found in Okonkwo of Umuofia.
Chinua Achebe’s novel, Things Fall Apart, follows the tragic life of Okonkwo, a man who suffers a miserable fate due to the fear of failure that controls every action he makes. Though the fear of failure acts as motivation to become a successful and respected man at first, it later cripples Okonkwo in such a way that failure ultimately defines his life. Okonkwo is constantly afraid of being a victim of weakness and desperately tries to remain a strong and unyielding man. It is his overwhelming fear of weakness that causes things to fall apart in his life, as his attempts to avoid failure and weakness eventually lead to the ultimate defeat: his shameful suicide.
The death of Okonkwo at the end was unpredictable to the readers because throughout the novel, Chinua Achebe described him as a strong warrior who feared of nothing besides failure and weakness. When Okonkwo committed suicide, he also committed the only thing he feared, and that was weakness. Things Fall Apart was the book about power, strength, sentiment, religion and love; it also contained several dramatic ironies. Although Achebe had written many books and novels, Things Fall Apart was one of his finest work that got listed as the Classic Bestseller. His delicately African style furnished the uniqueness as well as the prominence to the book.
The novel Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe is a story that opens the reader's mind to an entirely different way of living in a Nigerian village. Achebe was born in Nigeria in 1930, perhaps this is why he writes a whole book on a Nigerian village and introduces to us the ways of life for the Nigerian people. From the first page of the book to the last, Achebe allows the reader to enter the mind of the main character Okonkwo. Okonkwo is the leader of his village and is very respected for his many achievements. Although Okonkwo means well for his village, the novel invites the reader to see him has a flawed character who eventually suffers from the consequences of bad "masculine" decisions he makes throughout the book.
Iyasẹre, Solomon Ogbede. “Okonkwo's Participation in the Killing of His ‘Son’ in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart: A Study of Ignoble Decisiveness.” Understanding Things Fall Apart: Selected Essays and Criticism. Troy, NY: Whitson, 1998. 129-40. Print.
The character of Okonkwo in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart was driven by fear, a fear of change and losing his self-worth. He needed the village of Umuofia, his home, to remain untouched by time and progress because its system and structure were the measures by which he assigned worth and meaning in his own life. Okonkwo required this external order because of his childhood and a strained relationship with his father, which was also the root of his fears and subsequent drive for success. When the structure of Umuofia changed, as happens in society, Okonkwo was unable to adapt his methods of self-evaluation and ways of functioning in the world; the life he was determined to live could not survive a new environment and collapsed around him.
Throughout history, there have been many instances of people struggling to identify and cope with change and tradition, and this is no different in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.
Chinua Achebe's novel, Things Fall Apart, uses the changes in African tribal culture brought about by European colonization to illustrate the evolution of the character Okonkwo. As Okonkwo leads his life, his experiences, personality and thought are revealed to the reader. The obstacles he faces in life are made numerous as time progresses. Okonkwo's most significant challenge originates within himself. He also encounters problems not only when in opposition to the white culture, but in his own culture, as he becomes frustrated with tribal ideals that conflict with his own. The last adversary he encounters is of the physical world, brought upon himself by his emotional and cultural problems. The manner through which Okonkwo addresses his adversaries in Things Fall Apart creates the mechanism that leads to his eventual destruction.
Okonkwo is the main character within the book, Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe. Okonkwo is an individual whom has many different personalities that are portrayed in different situations. He can be a nice and welcoming individual but also an abusive and harmful individual. Before returning to Umofia, in which the missionaries had invaded, Okonkwo had grown up upon resenting his father’s laziness, devoting his time in proving that he was much better than his father. That he was more respectable and masculine. These were qualities in which Okonkwo’s father had lacked. Upon reaching Umofia, Okonkwo becomes more passive than he has ever been. While watching in sorrow and grief of the coming of the missionaries as he is unable to anything about. The missionaries had turned Okonkwo into a completely different individual. Changing him for the worst.