Individualism In Things Fall Apart

Throughout Things Fall Apart, the tragic flaw of ruthlessness disrupts the set order of society, and causes a lost insight of the culture in which Okonkwo has become accustomed to living. Okonkwo has began to continuously disregard the rules that were set generations before him as he desires to feel different from the members of his clan. Okonkwo is tempted to feel like not only an important member of his community, but an individual from the other clan members. Umuofia is held accountable for “making others within itself experience the feeling of not fully belonging”(Korang 21) by treating the people of the community as one instead of separating the individuals of the society. Throughout the book, Umuofia is the cause of the temptation to

Due to these rules that prohibit individualism, Okonkwo becomes a ruthless individual with a mindset of being the most powerful. He strives to be seen as different, and because of this desire he becomes infused in achieving what must be done to be seen by his clansmen as manly. Throughout Things Fall Apart, “Achebe shows the reader the great fault-lines in the community”(Korang 21) leading the readers to ponder how Umuofia is a true community when it completely lacks individuality. Due to a desire to make the members of the citizenry feel included they create a group of people that feel as because they are the same they need to act in an irrational manner. Incessantly throughout the novel "we can understand this individuality in application in this sense: the clan provides the rules of the social game, as it were, rewarding those who, in self-submission to the discipline of the rules, distinguish themselves in play"(Korang 17). Okonkwo figures that the only way to feel like an individual is to disembark the rules, and do what he needs to fulfill this entitlement he has set for

Due to the lack of masculinity and failure that Okonkwo’s father bestowed upon him, he regularly feels he does not have any value. Okonkwo has developed a mindset that he has to prove his worth by acting in an uncivilized way causing him to be seen as less of a man than Unoka. The rules in Umuofia have been created “to produce actual doers and achievers like Okonkwo,”(Korang 20) designated in creating a society that is ambitious which in reality turns the society to be tempted by the desire to hold power over the other members. Okonkwo is one who is consistently trying to accomplish more than his father did causing him to become a ruthless individual. A place in society where Okonkwo does not want to be is “in another category of second-class citizen in Umuofia. To this category belong those, like Okonkwo’s father Unoka, constructed by Umuofia’s hegemonic masculinist order as lesser or inauthentic men—hence men whose manhood is a mockery—and thus consigned, in public shame and derogation, to being excluded onlookers while the great affairs of the clan world are conducted by real men”(Korang