Fear is a feeling no one wants to admit they have. A young child, though, will say what they are afraid of, but as one gets older the more they want to be looked as a tough person. Zack Wamp puts it perfectly, no one should be scared or afraid to go into the future, but yet be intrigued into stepping into a new light of knowledge and learning. In Chinua Achebe's book Things Fall Apart he shows the Ibo people and their fear, superstition, response to fear and the British.
Fear affects everyone's life no matter if it is fact or even fiction. When one is fearful of something, that person changes the way of living their life. In one of the first chapters of the book we see that the people of Umuofia are afraid to go outside during the night without moonlight. "Children were warned not to whistle at night for fear of evil spirits."(9) Once that moon, is up it seems that everything should be middling and the people of Umuofia fear of becoming snake dinner escapes their minds. Children have high pitched laughs. What if one of the kids during
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the moonlit nights a kid squealed, would it send a evil spirit? This fear leads up the next topic, superstition. Dictionary.com defines superstition as, "any blindly accepted belief or notion." The Ibo people are mentally "blind" in the way their gods do certain things. “An abominable religion has settled among you,"(167) This goes to say that a infirior new religion has come into the Ibo's land and started to build up. It continues to say, "He can curse gods of his fathers and his ancestors, like a hunter’s dog that suddenly goes mad and turns on his master. I fear for you; I fear for you the clan.”(167) It is stated that the children of the tribes have started to loose the kinship and the clan. Going deeper, one of the things that can cause clans to fall is the traditions of people. If the tradition of a family or tribe starts fading away, it can cause the younger generations not to even know about their ancestor's beliefs and morals. To put it into a perspective of today's day and age is the Star Spangled Banner. Not many people of today know what it is about. Americans don't have to go through the struggles, in 2016, of having to live with a foolish king. In the book, if the older generation doesn't tell their kids and their grandkids why they have these traditions of fearing these gods and spirits they can start to become hesitant in what they believe. That is why fear will affect the Ibo's response to the British. Responding to fear and uncommon settlers cause the village of the Ibo people to become hectic.
These Ibo people are already afraid of the British due to them killing the Abame tribe, but now they are coming into their other villages and say that "their buttocks" are going to build some building so they can worship a God they have. To top it off one of the new Christians, Enoch, taunts the egwugwu, or spirits. Even if someone doesn't believe the same as another they should not make fun of their beliefs. Enoch knocks off one of the egwugwu's masks off essentially killing the "spirit". This fear of the British increased, because now one of their own has killed a "spirit" that could possibly enable a curse on them or crop. "Enoch had killed an ancestral spirit, and Umuofia was thrown into confusion."(186) After all this rage against the British has already happened on of the Ibo's own people has caused Umuofia into fear and
confusion. Zack Wamp put into a perfect way. The Ibo people should not be afraid of the natural things that affect the way they go outside at night, or the fact that the new generation is coming up and going to make new traditions, and lastly that other fears can cause the way one acts towards others. People need to make a new way for new things to be allowed into their brains. If someone never changes how they live they will be living the same life everyday.
Fear is a powerful emotion. Wikipedia.com describes fear as “an emotion induced by threat perceived by living entities, which causes a change in brain and organ function and ultimately change behavior, such as running away, hiding or freezing from traumatic events.”Most people tend to avoid fearful situations, not realizing that something positive may come out of the event or experience. Victor Villaseñor focuses on the topic of fear in his novel titled Burro Genius. Villaseñor demonstrates to readers how growing up he was extremely fearful of any situation. Victor also tells his readers how he turned his fear into motivation into motivation to keep going and reach his ultimate goal of becoming a published author.
“When you say 'fear of the unknown', that is the definition of fear; fear is the unknown, fear is what you do not know, and it's genetically within us so that we feel safe. We feel scared of the woods because we're not familiar with it, and that keeps you safe.” – M. Night Shyamalan
In the book “Things Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe certain themes are present in the the
Change is a word that the world does not like to hear. Whether it is politics, family, or even the climate, change is a factor of life that people fear. The world has tradition and a set pace of culture. One place this tradition and culture is prominent is in the underdeveloped regions of Africa. Chinua Achebe wrote a novel, Things Fall Apart to put on display the culture of a group called the Ibo from Nigeria. These Ibo people are a perfect example of how change does not occur and how tradition prevails in some places. The story is of their everyday life and specifically follows one character named Okonkwo, who is the ultimate example of a fear of change. Events in his life that do change him and his family allow for a dramatic story of a
Fear is an emotion that negatively influences people to shy away from their plans. Throughout the novel, The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, many characters are overcome with fear and more specifically, the fear of loss and fear of the future. Coelho repeatedly shows that by conquering these fears, people are freed from the bounds of fear and therefore willing to take action on their dreams.
Fear motivates many people to act upon matters, right or wrong. This emotion has been important in many events in both works of literature, and in the real world. It has forced military geniuses into retreat, and influenced them to plan another method of attack. Fear can be both a positive and a negative acting force in one’s life, a quality that can motivate one to success as well as to downfall.
To reiterate, fear links to constant fear of conformity, secretive behavior, and obsession with religious teachings that protect the conservative views of the society of Waknuk. What I have learned in The Chrysalids by John Wyndham is that fears affect perception, your perception changes according to your psychological state and it affects your behavior as well. People reflect regarding their fears all the time and as they feel that they will come upon them, they start becoming apprehensive. When an individual is afraid of something, they may experience unusual judgment that they would have never made before which all the main events that occur in The Chrysalids relate. The main thing I learned was the two powerful emotions that result our actions is fear and love.
Fear is the emotional state that someone goes into when they feel threatened or endangered. The fact that we do not know everything makes us think that everything we do not know is feared. There are many stories that include the fear of the unknown. Each poem, story, and drama include some type of fear. In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, “Hills Like White Elephants”, and “Poof” there is an extensive amount of fear for the unknown. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ernest Hemingway, and Lynn Nottage all used the fear to their advantage while writing and making an entertainment for the readers.
In the words of Bertrand Russell, “Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom” (Russell). Fear causes many problems in our lives. Fear influences many of a person’s actions and decisions. However, people usually regret the decisions or actions they made out of fear. Also, these actions and decisions can cause problems for those people in their future. Fear is a harmful emotion, for it clouds people’s judgement, disables them from taking action, and causes them to make decisions that they will regret later.
This paper is focused on how fear as a subject is being perceived by many as a dominant and primitive human emotion. An uncontrollable energy that’s exists and created within every individual, which is directed towards an object or a given situation that does not present an actual danger. The individual then analyzes that the fear is contradictory and thus cannot help the reaction. Gradually, the phobia aims to build up and aggravate as the fear of fear response takes hold. Eventually they distinguish their fear responses as negative, and go out of their way to avoid those reactions. ‘Fear is derived as a basic feeling and therefore created by us – it is not something we have, but something we do. The principle of fear is to keep us safe.’
Almost every civilizat in the world was at one time colonized by another civilization with differing cultural beliefs. this is just the case in the Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart. were the Umuofia tribe in niger has being colonized by the british empire. which leds to the members of their tribe to either decide to learn to give into the brits and leave there way of life and accept the new christian teachings or have to fight to uphold their way of life that has kept order and peace in the village. by the end of the book many of the natives start rethinking their culture and join the christian church but the main character named Okonkwo all he is know is to work hard and slowly work his way up the umuofia's social ladder but it is now threatened by the the new christians teachings. at the end of the book okonkwo instead of fighting and knowing he will be unsuccessful he decides to kill himself because no matter how strong he is he knows that his fate was either kill himself or have all of his hard work to be
In the book “Things Fall Apart”, evidence of a social structure was apparent within the Igbo community. This rigid social structure served as a purpose to balance the life of the people within the society, as well as promoting the downfall of the clan. The social structure was important in keeping a centralized society and preventing any sign of corruption within their clan. The social structure had advantages in keeping a balanced and equal society, supporting a division of labor, providing a surplus of food, individual huts, a communal society, and the development of some kind of government. In contrast, this social structure led others to reject to cooperate with the new religion and aided the lack of unity among the people. It also promoted a more patriarchal society, the inferior rank of women, and the lack of strong bonds between family members.
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
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.