Relationship Between White and Black in The Bridegroom and Things Fall Apart

Since both The Bridegroom (First published by Heinemann in 1958) and Things Fall Apart belong to the category of African literature, the relationship between black and white men in Africa is a subject that the two literary works must deal with. In Things Fall Apart, readers get in contact with first phase of colonialism in lower Niger, and in Bridegroom, readers catch glimpses of the period of apartheid. Writers of The Bridegroom and Things Fall Apart successfully use the description of relationship to stress on the themes, which are racial segregation in The Bridegroom, and social disintegration in Things Fall Apart. The ways of achieving this is through the use of narrative viewpoints, diction, dialogue and conflict.

Both writers use third person point of view to create a generally realistic mood. The Bridegroom creates everyday scene while Things Fall Apart tells the story in a biographical manner. The narrative viewpoint in The Bridegroom is limited to one person while In Things Fall Apart, the narrator is omniscient and presents the relationship from multiple viewpoints. The Bridegroom is told from the perspective of the protagonist, ‘he’ alone, and every bit of information about the relationship comes from either his dialogue with the black gang or the thoughts within him. This is an effective way of narrating the story because the background of story is apartheid, and it is the forced segregation that makes the two races could not really know each other on a deeper level. Therefore the limited perspective is not only a presentation of the fact but also a reflection on the theme of racial segregation.

Compared to this, the viewpoint of Things Fall Apart switches at times from the Ibo people to the colonizers, presenti...

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...“Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.” The cause of it is different attitude in dealing with the relationship with white men, while the result of it is the society falls apart, it is another example of how Chinua Achebe uses conflict to present the relationship between black and white people, linking it to the theme of social disintegration.

To conclude, although the two African literary works generally use similar literary devices of narrative viewpoint, diction, dialogues and conflict to deal with the subject of the relationship between white and black men. The similarities of the two writers in their descriptions suggest haunting effect racism while the difference presents the effect of time on social reform in different part of Africa.