Themes And Imagery In Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart

Crime is another main theme in the novel. In the Igbo tribe, crime is an offense towards the gods of the land which can also bring bad luck to the land. When a member of the clan commits a crime, the member can be exiled, or can serve some form of punishment or make sacrifices to avoid bad luck. In chapter thirteen, Okonkwo accidentally kills Ezeudu’s child during Ogbuefi Ezeudu’s funeral. This crime gets him exile from his clan for seven years. After his return to Umoufia, Okonkwo kills a white man and commits suicide because he lost faith in his clan to fight back and take back their land from the missionaries. Okonkwo breaks the greatest abomination of their tribe, which is to kill oneself. His body is deemed evil and bad for the land. Since Okonkwo commits a crime of killing himself, his clan decides not to bury him.
Okonkwo shares
One sample of figurative language emerges in the first chapter. It says “. . . Okonkwo 's fame had grown like a bush-fire in the harmattan . . .”(Achebe, 1). Imagery also materializes in the novel to help readers paint a picture of what is being described. One illustration of imagery occurs in chapter three when Okonkwo asks Nwakibie for yam seeds to grow his farm. Okonkwo says “The lizard that jumped from the high iroko tree to the ground said he would praise himself if no one else did” (Achebe, 14). Okonkwo uses this imagery to persuade Nwakibie that he is capable of being prosperous with Nwakibie’s yam seeds. Another illustration of imagery occurs in chapter three when Okonkwo describes the horrible harvest year that he encountered. Okonkwo says “The blazing sun returned, more fierce than it has ever been known, and scorched all the green that had appeared with the rain. The earth burned like hot coals and roasted all the yams that had been sown” (Achebe, 15). This image shows the drought and the bad harvest of that year. These are some of the imagery found in the