Fear Of Failure In Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart

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We all are afraid of something. Some people are afraid of heights; Some people are afraid of spiders. However, everyone is afraid of failure and this is even seen throughout many books. One example is the book Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. Throughout Things Fall Apart destruction and failure followed closely behind Okonkwo who, ironically, lived his entire life working out of the fear of failure and weakness. This fear of failure and weakness overtook Okonkwo’s entire life and ended up being the drive to his demise.
The first thing that I need to address is where Okonkwo gained his fear of failure because it comes not from his own personal failure and embarrassment, but rather that of the failures of his father. The failure of not being …show more content…

He was afraid of being thought weak.” Okonkwo suffers greatly for what he did though his change in mood. The boy he killed was a boy that lived with him and had become part of his family, but out of fear of being thought of as weak he killed a boy who he now thought of as his son. This took a toll on him mentally and increased his spiral downward. He didn’t eat at first and he was more irritable. He had been broken on the inside by his own fear of failure and weakness he had started to destroy himself internally. Yet again his fear drove him to do something that ultimately helps bring around his own failure and destruction. In addition to this the irony is that all the effort he puts in to make things go right and all the work he does to stop his fears from coming true it always does the complete opposite of what he intends it to do. As if it is not like he has a choice on the matter, later on in the book when he does something that causes him to get banished, which is what I will address next, he attributes this idea that no matter what he does to stop himself from being weak and stop himself from failure to him having a bad personal god that plays tricks on him. This in turn creates anguish in himself and the fear of more failure and weakness creating a vicious cycle that is the catalyst for his

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