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Okonkwo as the tragic hero in Chinua. Things fall apart
Okonkwo as the tragic hero in Chinua. Things fall apart
Okonkwo as the tragic hero in Chinua. Things fall apart
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The protagonist of the novel Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, Okonkwo, is an african man who lives in shame of his father’s failure in life. Through being shamed all of his life, he became very ambitious to be a success. Okonkwo’s success is built upon an extreme ambition, which ultimately leads to his downfall.
His father, Unoka is described as “lazy and improvident and was quite incapable of thinking about tomorrow.”(4) Whenever he received food, instead of using it wisely he will share it and have fun with the neighbors. Unoka is lazy and has skills, but chooses not to use them. He is a skilled flute player and practices instead of working.
Okonkwo, growing up hungry and shamed became very ambitious to not be like his father, lazy and improvident. Okonkwo is a strong, tall and talented young man. He is very well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. He is well known because of his feats in wrestling, the most famous being when he beat Amalinze the Cat. Since he
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This is because most of the fathers were able to support their children well and Unoka was not able to do that. He is in constant debt and he could never pay it back. Unoka keeps has a method of tracking how many cowries he is in debt. As he says “Each group there represents a debt to someone, and each stroke is one hundred cowries. You see I owe a man a thousand cowries.”(7) The effect of his father being improvident caused Okonkwo to hate everything about him. It is said that “Okonkwo was ruled by one passion - to hate everything that his father loved. One of those things was gentleness and another was idleness.”(13) This is part of such an extreme ambition within him. Due to the fact that he hated gentleness and idleness, he started to believe in rough and active life. This made Okonkwo very successful in life because he was strong and ready to work. His life wasn’t motivated by pure hatred but also by his
Okonkwo is one of the most powerful men in the Ibo tribe. In his tribe, he is both feared and honored. This is evident by this quote, "Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond... [He] brought honor to his tribe by throwing Amalinze the Cat..."(3) This suggests that in Okonkwo's society, power is attained by making a name for yourself in any way possible, even if that means fighting and wrestling to get your fame. Although honor is a good thing, when people have to fight to gain it, it becomes an object of less adoration. Okonkwo's "prosperity was visible in his household... his own hut stood behind the only gate in the red walls. Each of his three wives had her own hut... long stacks of yams stood out prosperously in [the barn]... [Okonkwo] offers prayers on the behalf of himself, his three wives, and eight children." (14) Okonkwo has also worked and tended to his crops in a very zealous fashion, and drives everyone around him to work as hard as he does. Because of this, he earns his place as one of Umuofia's most powerful men. In many cultures, a big family is a source of pride. Although Okonkwo is not always pleased by his children and wives, it also brings him a source of pride to have three wives and eight children. Large families mean that the head of the family is able to support all of them. Okonkwo's devotion to his crops and family gives to him the respect that any father and husband deserves, and in his culture, being able to fight and kill as well gives him even more influence and power.
Then there is a staggering list of achievements. Okonkwo is a strong character but thinks only inwardly - especially towards his father - which will be discussed further in this essay. As a child Okonkwo was neglected by his father and even later in his life did not speak with him until of course his father was on his deathbed, this made him very angry. Okonkwo always saw his father Unoka as lazy. Okonkwo worked hard to remove any trace of laziness from his personality.
“With a father like Unoka, Okonkwo did not have the start in life which many young men had. He neither inherited a barn nor a title, or even a young wife. But in spite of these disadvantages, he had begun even in his father’s lifetime to lay the foundations of a prosperous future” (18). Most of his accomplishments were despite his father, whom Okonkwo loathed, but with whom I connected. In the novel, I relate more to Okonkwo’s father, Unoka, a much more laid back character. Like Unoka, I am in love with life, lazy, not worried about tomorrow, and deeply in debt.
It challenged his identity by losing his high title in the clan due to the change in the village as well as new customs. He responded to the clash of cultures by attempting to encourage others to fight in his mission to get rid of the Western influences in the Ibo community. Because he failed to do so, he lost hope and refused to accept the new culture which caused him to hang himself. The conflict between Okonkwo and his clan’s decision to change their way of living was portrayed through characterization and plot development. Achebe gives the people of Africa a voice with Okonkwo’s character who stayed true to his roots. In Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe reveals to us Okonkwo’s response as the cultural collision of the English and Ibo challenged his sense of
Okonkwo was well known through out the nine villages because of his achievements in the tribe. Okonkwo had a great fear of becoming like his father. This had a rather large impact on his life and how his personality. Okonkwo’s father, Unoka, was a lazy man whereas Okonkwo was a hard worker, Okonkwo ruled his house with a heavy hand and he was a man of war.
At the beginning of the novel Okonkwo was a fairly wealthy and well-respected member of the Igbo society, but it had not always been that way for him. Okonkwo?s father, Unoka, had been a lazy man who would rather play his flute than take care of his crops. Unoka was said to be a charming man, and was able to borrow large amounts of money from his friends, but was never able to pay it back. As a result, Okonkwo has grown up very poor and ashamed of his lazy father. At one point in the book, Okonkwo remembers hearing one of his playmates calling his father an ?agbala,? which was the word for woman, but all described a man who had taken not titles (13). Okonkwo never forgets this, and actually develops a deep-seated fear that people will think that he is weak like his father. As I mentioned, Okonkwo became very well known, and his wealth and prestige rested solely on his own personal achievements. Okonkwo had received no inheritance from his poor father, no land and no money. As a young man, Okonkwo had been very successful wrestler, and as he grew older he became a well-known warrior. He was said to have brought home five human heads, which was a great achievement even for men who were much older that he was. At the beginning of the story, Okonkwo had obtained two titles, and had the respect of every man from all nine villages of Umuofia. Symbols of his wealth and prestige were his family and his compound. As I mentioned earlier, Okonwo had received no inheritance, and at the time of this story Okonkwo is still fairly young, and the fact that he had three wives, several children, and a very productive piece of land showed that Okonkwo was a very diligent worker. ?Okonkwo ruled his household with a heavy hand. His wives, especially...
From an early age, Okonkwo was ashamed of his father, Unoka, who was unable even to feed his family. The unpredictability of receiving enough food at a young age was enough to inspire fear and embarrassment in Okonkwo who associated this embarrassment with his father and was given further justification for these feelings when he went out into Umuofia, discovering that the other villagers held similar opinions of Unoka. When he was old enough, Okonkwo began farming his own yams because “he had to support his mother and two sisters […] And supporting his mother also meant supporting his father” (25). Okonkwo’s self-reliance was admired, valued in the community where “age was respected […] but achievement was revered” (12); this admiration gave him feelings of security, and the respect of his peers pushed him towards greater self-respect, distancing him from his father. The security and respect became related in his mind as he viewed his acceptance in the community as his life’s goal and Okonk...
Okonkwo is known throughout Umuofia to be extremely masculine. He rarely shows signs of fear or weakness. This is because Oknokwo promised himself he would be the complete opposite of his father Unoka. Unoka had passed away ten years prior to when the story takes place but he has always been remembered as a weak, lazy, poor man who could barely provide for his family. He was always in debt and didn't care to work, he would play his flute all day everyday if he was able to. "People laughed at him because he was a loafer, and they swore never to lend him any more money because he never paid back" (5). Unoka was the laugh of the town and Okonkwo would never allow himself be that.
Unoka – Okonkwo’s father, Unoka, was considered lazy and a failure. He never worked and always took from others. Okonkwo considered him a complete embarrassment and vowed never to be like his father. He had to hate what Unoka once loved, and never borrow money or stop working.
Unoka expressed his love to his children by consoling them in times of hardship and by never beating and abusing them. “Do not despair. I know you will not despair. You have a manly and a proud heart”. Nevertheless, Okonkwo showed his love by beating and punishing his family to stamp out the laziness so that his children can end up doing great things.
Okonkwo grew up from poverty to wealthy enough to support three wives, and many children. He was well respected by his clansmen from his village. Although, Okonkwo has many great aspects in his life, his tragic flaw is the fear of becoming like his father. While everyone was working on their farm, Unoka did nothing but drink, dance, and just plainly pray to the gods.
Unoka’s most visible characteristic was, perhaps, his lack of motivation when it came to labor. He was known throughout his village as a man of little work. For instance, towards the beginning of Chapter Three, Achebe writes, “You, Unoka, are known in all of the clan for the weakness of your machete and hoe. … They cross seven rivers to make their farms; you stay at home and offer sacrifices to a reluctant soil (Achebe 20).” This quote comes from a priestess who, upon Unoka’s consultation visit about his farm, tells him that his laziness not only keeps him from success, but how his fellow farmers are much more capable than he is. Unfortunately, even a declaration from one the gods was unable to motivate him. As an indolent, titleless man, he was dependent on his family and his village for simple staples, such as food. Being so, over the course of his life he developed a sizable debt that he had naught but dreams of repaying. Neither the gods, the degenerating welfare of his family, nor his increasing debt were able to instill a sense of urgency or n...
In Things Fall Apart, Unoka is signified for his habitual idleness as his only concern is his passion is to enjoy life which causes him to fail accomplishing his responsibilities, and through this struggle of stabilizing his life, readers can closely examine a different human condition of allowing people’s pleasure to come in the way of their responsibilities. In Umuofia, Unoka is known for constantly being in debt as he completely disregards the significance of hard work and instead prioritizes his own delight. This is why Unoka never succeeds to pay his debts back and instead continues to borrow more money, just for the purpose of his pleasure, “In his [Unoka’s] day, he was lazy and improvident and was quite incapable of thinking about tomorrow.
He achieved this high status through hard work. For example, when he was eighteen years old, he defeated a wrestler known as Amalinze the Cat. According to Achebe, "Amalinze was the great wrestler" who went undefeated for seven years (3). Okonkwo is conveyed as "a wealthy farmer and had two barns full of yams, and had just married his third wife" (8). He also "worked daily
Chinua Achebe's novel, Things Fall Apart, uses the changes in African tribal culture brought about by European colonization to illustrate the evolution of the character Okonkwo. As Okonkwo leads his life, his experiences, personality and thought are revealed to the reader. The obstacles he faces in life are made numerous as time progresses. Okonkwo's most significant challenge originates within himself. He also encounters problems not only when in opposition to the white culture, but in his own culture, as he becomes frustrated with tribal ideals that conflict with his own. The last adversary he encounters is of the physical world, brought upon himself by his emotional and cultural problems. The manner through which Okonkwo addresses his adversaries in Things Fall Apart creates the mechanism that leads to his eventual destruction.