Things Fall Apart Rhetorical Analysis

Things Fall Apart is, then, fired by a will-to-power, a desire to repossess one’s own past or history as it really was, or might have been, than to passively accept and depend on patronizing and condescending western representations of that past or that history. The literary mode of production is, then, itself a site of conflict or contention, with diametrically opposed or multiple varied modes of writing and writing and reading “co-existing” “contrapuntally”, in a “dialectical”, thesis-antithesis-synthesis “fashion”. In the beginning are the word, logos, and all the rest follows from that originary moment. Small wonder, then, that the district commissioner, at the end of Things Fall Apart, hopes to confirm and reconfirm, through a process

It may not be implausible here to suggest that this “redemptive” moment lies, in fact, in Ekwefi’s story which she tell her daughter, Ezinma, in chapter eleven, just before the shitstorm is about to break. For by chapter thirteen of Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo is to be abruptly confronted by his fate, when he accidently kills the dead tribal grandee, Ezeudu’s sixteen year old son and incurs the Earth goddess’s wrath, translated into a “female” seven year period of exile for him to Mbanta, his mother’s ancestral village. The rest, as they say, is history. Ekwefi’s time honored story, told with variations according to changing situations as are the Igbo proverbs, invokes a primordeal time that is, to recall Mircea Eliade’s words, “in illo-tempore”, in the beginning of sacred time. Unlike the rigid stratifications, in Things Fall Apart, in the Igbo community’s “classification system”, and also in the colonial administrative apparatus that displaces that rooted community, Ekwefi’s story is told, not merely for entertainment or to while away the time, but also to instruct: it is based on a “mythic” order where the boundaries between the human kind, animals and gods is fluid and uninstructed, rather than an inflexible or hierarchal, one. It displaces hierarchy and linearity, “profane time”, with limen, or liminality. It the New Testament

By doing this, he is enabled to blur the line, between the clan’s sustaining oral myth- how the clan’s founder fantastically engaged the spirit of the wild for seven days and nights and yet won and the more plausible realistic literary narrative of Okonkwo, who wins his spurs when he wrestles down the legendary Cat. The purpose here, in a realistic narrative, is to give Okonkwo an almost mythic status in his community, to raise him to the folklore level of a culture hero. Ironically, the higher he is elevated and placed on a pedestal at the beginning of Things Fall Apart, the greater and more resounding his fall in the end. The “founder” of the clan had, “in illo tempore”, sacred time, opened up an entire future for his clan; Okonkwo, in the historical present, on the other hand, is at least partly responsible for the fore closer of that clan’s future.

Achebe, in the choice of his novel’s title, Things Fall Apart, homages Yeats by closely adhering, in his narrative, to the words of Yeats ‘s “system”- based poem- “Second Coming”, the “Rough Beast”, colonization and imperialism, “its hour come round at last,” “slouches” towards Igboland to be “born again”. The consequences of this “Second Coming”, however, is that in Things Fall Apart, “the center