![]() The arrival of the Christians tolls the death knell of tribal society and close community bonds. His death symbolises the death of the traditional community.įundamentally Things Fall Apart is, is a commentary on the strength that people find in community. ![]() Unlike Odysseus, who defeats his wife’s suitors, shows himself to be the hero, and takes back his household, Okonkwo cannot rid his tribe of the new order with its ‘abominable religion’, so he hangs himself. Like Odysseus, Okonkwo comes home after a long period of exile and finds it occupied by pernicious usurpers. Achebe’s hero, like Odysseus, is long suffering and is dedicated to his family. Achebe achieves this, like Homer, through the use of stock phrases and repetitive actions that evoke a mythic and timeless quality. Achebe’s style is analogous to Homer, not because his story is a narrative epic – indeed there is no plot to speak of – but because of a focus on ritualistic customs like the breaking of kola nut and sharing of palm wine and a preoccupation with propitiating the gods. The power of Things Fall Apart is its boundlessness the apparent lack of a message is a more powerful way of implying one. Although, for those of us who don’t read Igbo, the sprinkling of native words is mostly fatuous. Like Hemingway, Achebe writes about masculine pursuits in simple, direct and dignified prose. Things fall apart the centre cannot hold Īchebe is Homer meets Hemingway. The sense that something is lost in this encounter is reinforced by the title of the book, which is appropriated from Yeats’s poem The Second Coming: Later, when the English arrive and build churches and court houses, the ties that bind come undone and the traditional Igbo society begins to fracture. But after he causes the accidental death of a boy during a festival, he is exiled from his clan for seven years. Okonkwo is not a free thinker he stands steadfastly for traditional tribal and martial values, yet his dedication and courage are almost admirable. Even though Okonkwo deeply loves and admires his daughter Ezinma, he can’t accept her at face value and his constant refrain is, “She should have been a boy”. He was afraid of being thought weak.’ This fear also leads him to occasionally beat his wives (he attempts shoot one) and drives his sensitive eldest son away from him. ![]() ‘Dazed with fear, Okonkwo drew his machete and cut him down. His hamartia becomes starkly apparent when he has a hand in the murder of a young boy from a rival clan whom he loves and had looked after for three years. ![]() But Okonkwo is ultimately dominated by fear. He also cultivates martial virtue and achieves fame as a great wrestler and warrior – at important ceremonies he drinks from the skull of the first man he killed in war. Okonkwo overcompensates with hard work from ‘cock-crow until the chickens went to roost’, and so he grows rich and respected, with a large barn full of yams and three wives. His personality is a reaction to the shame he feels on behalf of his father, an indolent, yet charming, failure who couldn’t provide for his family. To show affection was a sign of weakness – the only thing worth demonstrating was strength.’ Okonkwo is a rigidly one-dimensional character, unable to adapt to change and unyielding in his harsh expectations of others. He ‘never showed any emotion openly, unless it be the emotion of anger. Aggressive masculinity is his most prized personality trait. He’s belligerent and suppresses his warmer, gentler emotions. The protagonist of the story, Okonkwo the yam man, doesn’t cut a very sympathetic figure. But he also portrays a culture with rich storytelling, artistic, and religious traditions, buttressed by a strong sense justice and morality. Achebe doesn’t paint pre-colonial village life as a prelapsarian utopia instead, he explores a dark heart of violence, machismo, and misogyny.
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