In the two books, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck, there is a main point that is made. The main characters in the novels are both hard workers and are determined to become the best in their clan or village, but their desires prevent them from being a successful person or a failure. These characters have some situations where their desires get the best of them and they either make a good choice or make a bad one. In these two novels, a comparison of the different characters, the situations of the characters, and a major theme will be made to show that desires can lead to either wonderful or dreadful factors.
The two main protagonists in these novels are Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart and Wang Lung in The Good Earth. Their characters are very similar and they each want something, but they way that they meet their end goal is what varies between each person. First, Okonkwo yearns to be better than his father: “He had not patience with his father. Unoka, for that was his father’s name, had died ten years ago. In his day he was lazy and improvident and was quite incapable of thinking about tomorrow.” (Achebe, 4) He did not want to be the lazy and careless person that his father was. This became his ultimate motivation in life and every time a situation came up, this would be the thing that he would base his decisions off of. Since he is the opposite from his father, he became a hardworking, brave, and violent. These character traits come from his desires, which later lead to his bad choices. Okonkwo became very aggressive due to the passiveness of his father. This causes him to create violence in the village and his desire to be violent caused him to break any attempt at peace: “And when she retur...
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..., a comparison of the characters, situations of the characters, and a major theme are made to show that desires can direct them to a helpful or a harmful situation.
Works Cited
Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. New York: Anchor, 1994. Print.
Buck, Pearl S. The Good Earth. New York: Washington Square, 2004. Print.
Hajee, Karim. "Power Of Desire." Power Of Desire. Web. 23 Mar. 2014. .
"In Order to Succeed, Your Desire for Success Should Be Greater than Your Fear of Failure. | Philosiblog." Philosiblog. 24 Feb. 2012. Web. 23 Mar. 2014. .
Meyer, Paul J. "Increase Your Desire to Succeed." SUCCESS. Web. 23 Mar. 2014. .
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts”
Often, when a story is told, it follows the events of the protagonist. It is told in a way that justifies the reasons and emotions behind the protagonist actions and reactions. While listening to the story being cited, one tends to forget about the other side of the story, about the antagonist motivations, about all the reasons that justify the antagonist actions.
Did you ever notice that human nature revolves around needs, desires, and wants? There are different types of needs, such as safety, social, basic needs. These desires and impulses gives us our survival and the ability to function in the environment we live in. Our subconscious mind is responsible for the decisions we make, and such impulses makes us commit actions we have no control of. In literature, we are able to understand and judge the character’s behavior more so than our own.
David Mamet once stated, “..it is the human lot to try and fail..” This quotation implies that an individual will attempt to achieve success throughout their lifetime, but he/she will also have to face the failures as well. The quote relates to the philosophy that in order to achieve something, one will have to work for it. This quotation is correct and is further supported by two literary works. The two novels are Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck and The Pearl, also by John Steinbeck. In these two novels, the protagonists know that their goals are very farfetched and out of the norm, yet they both try to achieve it and ultimately fail.
...rs and situations to help explain the societal issues surrounding the time period. The dreadfulness comes from the controversial issues and feelings these characters experience. These characters must overcome these dreadful experiences in order to change what society deems as acceptable in the future.
But for the protagonists in these stories, these forces are somewhat out of sync. Failures of individuation, and the completion of transformational journeys which lead to madness, resignation, and death point to an inability of the characters to reconcile their wants and needs with their actual lives.
These characters, however different they lie on the morality scale, all share the sinful trait of greed. They all ask, and take too much, ruining what the good that they had in their lives. Understanding their mistakes offers its useful readers a lesson, not to demand too much of the things we are offered. The characters struggle with their desires, each of them succombing to their passions.
Both characters have life goals before the fall. “In Things Fall Apart, Achebe makes it clear that Okonkwo’s single passion was ‘to become one of the lords of the clan’. According to Achebe, it was Okonkwo’s ‘life spring.’ Okonkwo wanted to be a hero,” claims Nnoromele (41). In becoming a great man and hero he must overcome the shame his father has left upon him. His father was lazy and had no titles. This helps motivate him on the road to heroism.
One of the most commonly asked questions about the novel Things Fall Apart is: why did Achebe choose a tragic hero, Okonkwo, as the main character in the story. According to Nnoromele, “A hero, in the Igbo cultural belief system, is one with great courage and strength to work against destabilizing forces of his community, someone who affects, in a special way, the destinies of others by pursuing his own. He is a man noted for special achievements. His life is defined by ambivalence, because his actions must stand in sharp contrast to ordinary behavior”(Nnoromele). In my opinion, he chose this type of hero to show the correlation between Okonkwo’s rise and fall in the Igbo society to the rise and fall of the Igbo culture itself. Many commentators have come up with various reasons for Okonkwo’s failure in the novel. Some say that it is just his chi that causes him to be a failure; however others believe it is because he is incapable of dealing with his culture deteriorating before his eyes. In Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo’s character as a tragic hero is a result of his chi, inability to cope with the destruction of the Igbo culture, and ultimately, his own suicide.
Chinua Achebe’s novel, Things Fall Apart, follows the tragic life of Okonkwo, a man who suffers a miserable fate due to the fear of failure that controls every action he makes. Though the fear of failure acts as motivation to become a successful and respected man at first, it later cripples Okonkwo in such a way that failure ultimately defines his life. Okonkwo is constantly afraid of being a victim of weakness and desperately tries to remain a strong and unyielding man. It is his overwhelming fear of weakness that causes things to fall apart in his life, as his attempts to avoid failure and weakness eventually lead to the ultimate defeat: his shameful suicide. Fear of failure and weakness dominates Okonkwo throughout his life.
The character of Okonkwo in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart was driven by fear, a fear of change and losing his self-worth. He needed the village of Umuofia, his home, to remain untouched by time and progress because its system and structure were the measures by which he assigned worth and meaning in his own life. Okonkwo required this external order because of his childhood and a strained relationship with his father, which was also the root of his fears and subsequent drive for success. When the structure of Umuofia changed, as happens in society, Okonkwo was unable to adapt his methods of self-evaluation and ways of functioning in the world; the life he was determined to live could not survive a new environment and collapsed around him.
Chinua Achebe characterizes the novel, “Things Fall Apart” as a doubt of title and confining to a reputation. The main character, Okonkwo, is diminishing his self worth by satisfying his believes of what is believed to be right – a man. Though his stubbornness of truth to value Ibo culture backfires on him repeatedly. Okonkwo’s requirement to being true to his reputation was to keep the tribe, Umuofia, to be unharmed/uncolonized. The root cause of his fear grow from within him as a child from this insignificant person of his father, Unoka. The want of wanting more and to be this leader for Umuofia, but also to his family. The choice of man to the society or man for himself was what kept the drive of fear in Okonkwo.
Chinua Achebe tells a strong story by using a brash and quick-to-action warrior in Things Fall Apart. The Story illustrates the way western colonization came and destroyed the Ibo people’s way of life. Okonkwo, the warrior and protagonist of the novel, is described in the novel as being someone who “was not a man of thought but of action” (69). His close friend Obierika however, is described as “a man who thought about things” yet was also a man of great standing in the novel (125). This contrast serves as a counterpoint to Okonkwo’s character traits and uses Obierika as a tool to enhance the readers' understanding of Okonkwo and his need to act.
People usually afraid of failure because they tried to do something and failed, or took a risk and it didn’t pay off, or made a decision and it turned out to be the wrong one. That fear of failure create the stress and anxiety when people want to do something hard or try something new. Just because you tried something two or three time and failing does not mean the entire idea is a mistake. Do you expect to get a Blackjack on every game that you played? That would be an impossible thing to do. There is no success that comes without failure, where failure is experiences and lessons that help you to perfect your works. People should overcome their fear of failure and use failure as a tool to work toward their success because failing is so important
The novel “Things fall Apart “by Chinua Achebe can be, consider as tragedy. As per Aristotle, tragedy should deal with the theme, which is serious and main protagonist in the novel should come from Nobel family and if he is not from Nobel family, he should earn high social statues. According to Aristotle True tragic hero should suffer both physically and mentally and further the novel should consist of conflict, rising action and then leading to resolution at last evoke pity and fear to the audience.".In this way, its shows the plot moves from hamartia through anagnorisis and peripetiea to catastrophe. However there is the presence of six major element of tragedy, plot, character, though, diction, song and spectacle.