Violence In Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart

Fear drives a man to do things unfathomable to his normal nature. In Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe writes a historical fiction about the disintegration of the Ibo culture through the views of the main character, Okonkwo. Okonkwo is a very successful man in his village but the fear of failure propels him to do things he might not have done. In result, he makes countless mistakes that expel him from his village and make him lose his own son. Even after moments of failure that would be awakening for any other person, Okonkwo does not become self aware of his forceful and cruel self which leads him to commit an action which breaks all the strings inside him. By killing the messengers of Christianity in the village, Okonkwo does not grasp the fact that violence is not the answer to everything he may consider wrong

By trying to fix his problems with the white man through violence, Okonkwo does not realize that violence may not be the answer to the problem he is trying to solve. During the time of Okonkwo’s banishment, Christian men from Europe started to steadily spread their religion upon the Ibo people which caused their own culture to dwindle. Okonkwo hoped the Ibo people would take physical measures against the white people but the meeting to decide this was not approaching this method so Okonkwo took measures into his own hands. As Achebe writes, “In a flash Okonkwo drew his machete...Okonkwo’s machete descended twice and the man’s head lay beside his uniform body… ‘That man was one of the greatest men in Umuofia.You drove him to kill himself.’” (Achebe 205,208). Okonkwo had faced loss many times throughout his life. The power that he had in his homeland was taken away when he accidently shot a man, he had lost his son whom he had beaten after finding out that he had joined the Christian men, and this bad luck was thought to originate from the time when he had abused his wife during the sacred week