Chinua Achebe is well known as the father of African literature. His first novel, “Things Fall Apart” is an interesting story full of tragedy, which takes place in Umuofia, Nigeria in the 19th century. Achebe sought to correct European writers who were misrepresenting Africans and life in Nigeria. According to Nnoromele (2000), the Igbo clan is a self-sufficient, complex, and vigorous group of African people. Achebe wrote “Things Fall Apart” to accurately represent the conflict between Nigeria’s white colonial government and the culture of the native Igbo people. “Things Fall Apart” is the perfect title for this novel. As the reader takes the journey through this interesting, yet tragic story, it becomes clear how, and why things fell apart.
Achebe effectively framed his story around the rise and fall of a tragic hero named Okonkwo. According to Dictionary.com (2011), a tragic hero is defined as “a literary character who makes an error of judgment or has a fatal flaw that, combined with fate and external forces, brings on a tragedy.” In the beginning, Okonkwo is a powerful and much respected villager in Umuofia. “But his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness” (13). This fear is the tragic flaw that threatens Okonkwo’s power and position with clansmen and the Igbo people. Eventually his life falls apart.
Achebe’s story is also framed around the village of Umuofia’s cultural traditions. Umuofia’s confrontation and struggle with colonialism from the West is effectively portrayed in the story. “The white man had indeed brought a lunatic religion, but he had also built a trading store and for the first time palm-oil and kernel became things of great price, and much money fl...
... middle of paper ...
... father, and he succeeded in destroying his relationship with his son Nwoye.
Works Cited
Achebe, C. (1959) Things fall apart, (1st Ed.) Anchor Books, New York, NY
Hoegberg, D. (1999). Principle and practice: the logic of cultural violence in Achebe’s
things fall apart. College Literature 26(1), 69-78.
Kirszner, L. G., & Mandel, S. R. (2010). Compact Literature: Reading, Reacting, Writing
(7th Ed.) Wadsworth Cengage Learning.
Larson, C. R. (1998) Okonkwo in his time. World & I, 13(3), 298.
Nnoromele, P. C. (2000). The plight of a hero in Achebe’s things fall apart. College
Literature, 27(2), 146-155.
Saltau, M. (2003). Inflexibility brings tribe undone; resources text talk. The Age
(Melbourne, Austrialia), 7.
Tragic hero. (n.d.). (2011). Dictionary.com Unabridged. Retrieved from http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/tragic hero
The events of Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart and the film Sugar Cane Alley detail the lives of a fictionalized Nigerian village and sugar cane harvesters in remote Martinique, respectively, during similar time periods of the 1900s. Both works contain explicit references to Christianity, and how the imposition of religion and white culture have negatively affected the African characters. European religious practice was used as a means of pacifying as well as terrifying the Umuofian people and the inhabitants of Sugar Cane Valley.
Set in Africa in the 1890s, Chinua Achebe's ‘Things Fall Apart’ is about the tragedy of Okonkwo during the time Christian missionaries arrived and polluted the culture and traditions of many African tribes. Okonkwo is a self-made man who values culture, tradition, and, above all else, masculinity. Okonkwo’s attachment to the Igbo culture and tradition, and his own extreme emphasis on manliness, is the cause of his fall from grace and eventual death.
In the book “Things Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe certain themes are present in the the
Chinua Achebe?s Things Fall Apart is a narrative story that follows the life of an African man called Okonkwo. The setting of the book is in eastern Nigeria, on the eve of British colonialism in Africa. The novel illustrates Okonkwo?s struggles, triumphs, and his eventual downfall, all of which basically coincide with the Igbo?s society?s struggle with the Christian religion and British government. In this essay I will give a biographical account of Okonwo, which will serve to help understand that social, political, and economic institutions of the Igbos.
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe tells the story of how one unified Umuofian community falls due to its own inner conflicts, as well as to the arrival of Christian missionaries. Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart to change the brutish image of Africa, for the Western world. The use of changing perspectives greatly aided Achebe in accurately portraying Africa as colorful, diverse and complex. For Westerners, viewing Africans as more than tribal and barbaric was a new concept, of which Achebe helped usher in. The story is told through the eyes of many Umuofians, which gives the reader a personal sense for the individuals within the tribe. When all the individual pieces of the story are brought together, the sifting perspectives creates a vast overview of the community, while also deepening the readers since for the tribe by allowing personal details to show through. Achebe captures the complexity of the Umuofia community by changing the perspective from which the story is being told frequently.
As wise John Berger once said,“Never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one”. A “single story” is the story of a culture that we learn from stereotypes and conspiracies developed throughout time in our society. In “Things Fall Apart”, Chinua Achebe defies the single story of African culture while still tying their native language in to show the importance between a physical differentiation of culture, and the similarities with morals and values they have in common. Through gender roles and proverbs used in the language of this book, we have a cultural insight of Nigeria through a new set of eyes given to us by Achebe that detures us from the single stories that we were taught to by our society.
Although Achebe conveys many different themes in his writing Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe expresses the importance of tribal beliefs in African Culture.
Achebe has chosen the appropriate title for his work, Things Fall Apart. Under the invasion of Christians, Ibo society fell apart. Achebe illustrates a traditional and unified society that little by little broke apart because of white missionaries that introduced their religion to the Ibo society. The collapse of Ibo society cannot be completely blamed on the Christians but also on the Ibo customs and beliefs that troubled some of the peoples mind. Achebe included some of the positive and negative aspects of Ibo culture and it is through some of his characters that he voiced objection to some of the Ibo the customs and beliefs.
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.
It is common knowledge that Africa has always been represented as a continent that is full of wild savages. It is perceived as fact that the people within this continent are running around with spears and live in small huts. The people who actually believe this are ignorant to the truth that Africa is a very large continent. It has many different cultures that deserve to be respected in their own right. These different cultures have their own laws, their own religion, and their own art. In Things Fall Apart, Umuofia is explained extensively. The whole first half of the novel goes into great detail of all that makes the culture so great. These people have a well developed religion, rules that they all follow, and even their own justice system. These people are very civilized in their own individual way. The disconnect comes in when, even though they have all the same elements as western civilization, they are are so different that those difference are considered unworthy. In the novel, the missionaries that visit Umuofia constantly ignore the people’s custom and consider those customs savage. One of the missionaries blatantly makes this clear when discussing their religion and says, “that they worshipped false gods, gods of wood and stone” (Achebe 145). From the outside, yes, it does look like all these people worship inanimate objects. What Achebe tries so hard to show is that the religion that the people of Umuofia followed is way more complicated than that. Their religion, along with their whole culture, is very complex and needs half a book to just scrape the top layer of it. Many of their beliefs even mirror many early Christian ideas. These people pray to their ancestors who will in return talk to the Gods they worship. This is parallel to how Catholics pray to saints as an indirect way to speak to God. The core of
“The white man had indeed brought a lunatic religion…” (153) thought Okonkwo in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. In the novel, the main character Okonkwo and his son Nwoye experience sudden changes in their village from the arrival of white men. They once began their lives in their native Ibo village of Umoufia. After Okonkwo commits a murder by accident, he is forced to be exiled to Mbanta for seven years. During the years of his exile, Okonkwo hears about white men missionaries appearing in Umuofia, who later come to Mbanta. The missionaries have promoted Christianity in both villages and some of the villagers even converted from Ibo culture to Christian. Finally, after the seven years, Okonkwo and Nwoye return to the new Umuofia, where little Ibo culture remains. Okonkwo and Nwoye react to the changed village differently. They have dissimilar perceptions about the influence of the white men because they had distinct life experiences that shaped their own views on life.
Before the arrival of the Europeans, Achebe did a excellent job portraying how the life of Igbo was before they were forced to oppose their own culture. To support this theme, Achebe included detailed descriptions of social rituals within each family, the justice system, religious practices and consequences, preparation and indulgence of food, the marriage process and the distributing of power within the men. Achebe shows how every man has an opportunity to prove himself worthy to achieve a title on the highest level, based merely on his own efforts. One may argue that the novel was written with the main focus on the study of Okonkwo’s character and how he deteriorates, but without the theme that define the Igbo culture itself, we would never know the universe qualities of the society that shaped Okonkwo’s life. The lives of the Igbo people was no different to the actual lives of the Ibos people back in the early days of Africa. Just like in Things Fall Apart, in actual African tribes there was never a ruler. “Very interesting thing about these villages is that there is no single ruler or king that controls the population. Decisions are made by including almost everyone in the village” (AfricaGuide). Using the theme, Achebe educated readers on by mirroring real African life in her
Throughout Chinua Achebe’s novel, Things Fall Apart, struggle between change and tradition is one of the most relevant issues. The Igbo villagers, Okonkwo, and his son Nwoye all experience this problem in many different ways. The villagers have their religion defied, Okonkwo reaches his breaking point and Nwoye finally finds what he believes in. People have struggled to identify and cope with change and tradition throughout history, and will continue to struggle with this issue in the
In 1958 Chinua Achebe published his first and most widely acclaimed novel, Things Fall Apart. This work-commonly acknowledged as the single most well known African novel in the world-depicts an image of Africa that humanizes both the continent and the people. Achebe once said, "Reading Heart of Darkness . . . I realized that I was one of those savages jumping up and down on the beach. Once that kind of enlightenment comes to you, you realize that someone has to write a different story" (Gikandi 8-9); Achebe openly admits that he wrote Things Fall Apart because of the horrible characterization of Africans in many European works, especially Heart of Darkness. In many ways, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart can be seen as an Afrocentric rebuttal to the Eurocentric depi...
Achebe negates the idea of Eurocentricism. He shows that Europe isn’t the center of the world. He also shows that Africa isn’t the red headed stepchild of the world either. While Africa may have some faults, it is far from being uncivilized and the home of savages. The Africans had their own government and religion. Achebe brings up the point that if Europe hadn’t tried to divide up Africa, they would have been better off. He shows this point when Okonkwo killed himself. He is symbolically saying that if the Europeans hadn’t come into Umuofia, Okonkwo wouldn’t have killed himself and wouldn’t have lost hope in his tribe.