Things Fall Apart Essay

“Perhaps down in his heart Okonkwo was not a cruel man. But his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and weakness.It was not external but lay deep within himself. It was the fear of himself, lest he should be found to resemble his father--” (Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 13). This is our introduction to the plight of the tragic hero in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.

Okonkwo is a respected and wealthy leader of the Umuofia tribe of the Igbo people, one of a sector of nine connected villages of Nigeria. He is a man who lives in constant fear of becoming his father, whom he believed to be a lazy and cowardly man who died in crippling debt. He spends his entire life trying to be the opposite of his father: He builds a home for himself and his family; He builds up a reputation as a great wrestler, having defeated the undefeated Amalinze the Cat in a wrestling match; He becomes a hard-working yam farmer and is able to provide for his three wives and eight children.

Okonkwo is sent to the neighboring tribe as war emissary to retrieve the persons of the peace agreement. He returns with a virgin girl to replace the woman whom was murdered and a young boy named Ikemefuna--the son of one of the men who murdered the young woman--who Okonkwo adopts. For three years, Okonkwo comes to love Ikemefuna as his own son even to the point of neglecting his natural born son Nwoye. But the tribe has decided that the boy must die. When the men of the tribe take Ikemefuna into the forest to kill him, Okonkwo participates in the murder by cutting him despite the elders speaking against such