Change scares people. Humans want to stay in their own safe little bubble, but how would they react if giant changes were made to everything they held dear? Chinua Achebe’s book, Things Fall Apart, revolves around Okonkwo, a leader of the Ibo clan in Umorfia, a Nigerian village. Okonkwo is a respected man who lives a good life, with many wives, and many children. This all changes when Christian missionaries begin to insert themselves into the tribal community, attempting to coerce many clan members into accepting their beliefs. Okonkwo is a strong, powerful man, who responds with hostility to the new culture around him, leading to his eventual fall from grace and disgrace of his legacy. To begin, Okonkwo was a fierce and powerful man before first confronting Western …show more content…
Starting off, Achebe states, “It happened so quickly that the six men did not see it coming. There was only a brief scuffle, too brief to even allow the drawing of a sheathed machete. The six men were handcuffed and led into the guardroom” (194). Okonkwo and some of his tribesmen, unwilling to change, go armed into the missionaries’ courthouse, and are captured and arrested. The amount of dislike and hatred Okonkwo has for these men cause his arrest. Next, Achebe ends Okonkwo’s story on a discouraging and terrible note, as she writes, “Okonkwo’s machete descended twice and the man’s head lay beside his uniformed body (…) Then they came to the tree from which Okonkwo’s body was dangling, and they stopped dead” (204/207). Okonkwo, who is too stubborn to change and be a part of the new culture, angrily kills one of the missionaries’ messengers. This leads him to kill himself, completely discrediting his life as a strong man, while also disgracing his legacy. Okonkwo’s life has completely changed, and his stubbornness was the
The novel Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe is a story that opens the reader's mind to an entirely different way of living in a Nigerian village. Achebe was born in Nigeria in 1930, perhaps this is why he writes a whole book on a Nigerian village and introduces to us the ways of life for the Nigerian people. From the first page of the book to the last, Achebe allows the reader to enter the mind of the main character Okonkwo. Okonkwo is the leader of his village and is very respected for his many achievements. Although Okonkwo means well for his village, the novel invites the reader to see him has a flawed character who eventually suffers from the consequences of bad "masculine" decisions he makes throughout the book.
Despite, these altercations he was unwilling to adapt to these changes. Okonkwo’s final repudiation came after his imprisonment along with other clan leaders. Not only were they profusely beaten, but they were also made to pay a hefty fine for their release. This act of imprisonment and release could be seen as the decline of power and authority that the natives had in their own homeland. Okonkwo’s final blow came when he murdered the district commissioner’s messenger as an act of rebellion and repudiation of the British rule.
While they do not use a directly violent approach, Okonkwo reacts to the missionaries in a violent way, showing that he did not learn anything from his seven-year exile. Achebe does this to further illustrate Okonkwo’s position as a plot device: whereas most tragic characters may experience a change of character after seven years, Okonkwo still refuses to accept things how they are and in this case, change, and therefore, he commits suicide.
Change is a word that the world does not like to hear. Whether it is politics, family, or even the climate, change is a factor of life that people fear. The world has tradition and a set pace of culture. One place this tradition and culture is prominent is in the underdeveloped regions of Africa. Chinua Achebe wrote a novel, Things Fall Apart to put on display the culture of a group called the Ibo from Nigeria. These Ibo people are a perfect example of how change does not occur and how tradition prevails in some places. The story is of their everyday life and specifically follows one character named Okonkwo, who is the ultimate example of a fear of change. Events in his life that do change him and his family allow for a dramatic story of a
In Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo was one of the strongest proponents of violence against the white missionaries. Throughout the book, he advocated for violence while be outnumbered by his fellow natives who objected. Near the end of the book, he had had enough. During a village meeting gathered to discuss what to do about the white missionaries, a messenger for the missionaries arrived to tell them the meeting had been ordered to be stopped. “In a flash Okonkwo drew his machete. The messenger crouched to avoid the blow. It was useless. Okonkwo’s machete descended twice and the man’s head lay beside his uniformed body”.3 The man had been killed. Shortly after, Okonkwo hanged himself on a tree. Violence was by far the most disruptive response to to the presence of white missionaries in Africa. It was the only response that led to deaths. Not only was the violence disruptive, it was also ineffective. In the last paragraph of the book, the Commissioner of the missionaries articulated how Okonkwo’s actions would make a good paragraph in the book he planned to write. Violence against missionaries was disruptive and led to death for both the locals and the
He was in great conflict with the ideas of the white men and the missionaries. Okonkwo saw that their beliefs had not only changed the daily life of the Ibo, but it also changed the people themselves: “He mourned for the warlike men of Umuofia, who had so unaccountably become soft like women” (Achebe 183). The author uses strong diction to compare the men before and after colonization. This quote also portrays Okonkwo’s opinion towards the cultural collision. He values strength and masculinity immensely because of his fear of appearing weak like his father Unoka. When he describes that the men of Umuofia changed to be soft like women, this shows how much he dishonors the Western ideas and how it has taken over the village. He made an attempt to get rid of the Western influence by urging the tribe to fight like men, but they refuse to. He was determined and still attempted to furthermore encourage the people of Umuofia to revolt against the new culture. He realizes that his attempts to return the village back to the way it was before were futile. He knew that Christianity was tearing his people apart, but knew he was incapable of making change to help his people. Okonkwo then starts to feel hopeless and abandoned by his clan, which causes him to commit suicide by hanging himself: “Obierika… turned suddenly to the District Commissioner and said ferociously: ‘That man was one of the greatest men
Some people might say that Okonkwo was just trying to protect the tradition and cultural of his tribal village but in actuality this is far from the truth. When Okonkwo cut down the guard, he made the swift assumption that his clansmen were as passionate about fighting colonialism as him and would follow him into war. When he found otherwise, he could not understand what had happened to his village. The next place he was seen was hanging from a noose in a selfish show of hypocrisy. In the end, Okonkwo's status among his tribe counted for nothing because his own despair over the colonization of his village led him to kill himself. His whole life Okonkwo strived to not to look weak like his father, but in the end he took the cowards way out, suicide. Suicide was a great sin against the Earth. Because he took his own life, Okonkwo, a great leader of Umuofia, had to be buried by strangers. All of his work and perseverance amounted to nothing because of what he had done.
Okonkwo is often described as being similar to characters in Greek tragedies. Okonkwo knew that the end of his clan was coming, and that they would do nothing to prevent it from happening. He took his life out of desperation. He had struggled his whole life to become a respected member of his community, and suddenly his world is turned upside down and changed forever because of an accident. Okonkwo sees that he is fighting a losing battle, so he quits. Suicide was one of the biggest offenses that could be committed against the earth, and Okonkwo?s own clansmen could not bury him. Okonkwo?s death symbolizes the end of patriarchy in Umuofia. The last page of the book is from the point of view of the white Commissioner, who notes that he wants to include a paragraph on Okonkwo?s life in his book entitled The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of Lower Niger. Okonkwo?s struggles, triumphs and defeats are all reduced to a paragraph, much like his culture and society will be reduced.
Okonkwo, a fierce warrior, remains unchanged in his unrelenting quest to solely sustain the culture of his tribe in the time of religious war in Achebe's book, Things Fall Apart. He endures traumatic experiences of conflict from other tribes, dramatic confrontations from within his own family, and betrayal by his own tribe.
Okonkwo’s determination to succeed in life and to not fail leads to his fatal downfall in the end of the novel. His inability to adapt to colonization and his failure to follow the morals of many of the morals of the Ibo culture also are an important key leading to his downfall. Okonkwo was willing to go to war against the missionaries, with or without the clan. He made it clear that he believed the missionaries were in the wrong for trying to change Umuofia. Since the clan wanted no part in the war with the missionaries, Okonkwo took action into his own hands and murdered the head messenger. During the killing of the messenger, Okonkwo had a moment of realization: “He knew that Umuofia would not go to war. He knew because they had let the other messengers escape. They had broken into tumult instead of action” (Achebe 205). Okonkwo finally understands that he doesn’t have support from his fellow clansmen anymore and he feels as if he loses his place in society. Instead of backing up Okonkwo and his decision to murder the messenger, the clan stood in both confusion and disorder and questioned, “ ‘Why did [Okonkwo] do it?’ ” (Achebe 205). Okonkwo’s impulsiveness causes the clansmen to question Okonkwo’s violent actions against the messenger. Throughout the entire novel, Okonkwo struggles to accept the missionaries and the changes that they
Tom Stoppard, a famous British playwright, once said, “From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts.” Stoppard describes that you can only get truth from the facts you know. Okonkwo, the main character in the book Things Fall Apart is not a true tragic hero. He meets two of the requirements, superiority and tragic flaw, however, he fails to meet the other two requirements, goodness and realization. Superiority and tragic flaw are met because they are explained thoroughly through the book, therefore making them facts. The goodness and realization aspects are assumed by some people based on principles, however, are not present or explained in the book..
Things fall apart focuses on the lifetime of the protagonist of the novel, Okonkwo. As the novel develops Okonkwo accidentally kills a person and he and his family are exiled from Umuofia. At the time of his exile white missionaries arrive in Umuofia and try to change the village. When Okonkwo returns to his village he sees various transformations that Umuofia has undergone at the time of his exile. Unhappy with the amendment, Okonkwo and other villagers come together to drive the white missionaries out of their land. Their efforts go in vain because the missionaries send their messengers to abort the meeting.
Throughout Chinua Achebe’s novel, Things Fall Apart, struggle between change and tradition is one of the most relevant issues. The Igbo villagers, Okonkwo, and his son Nwoye all experience this problem in many different ways. The villagers have their religion defied, Okonkwo reaches his breaking point and Nwoye finally finds what he believes in. People have struggled to identify and cope with change and tradition throughout history, and will continue to struggle with this issue in the
His society was complacent to change, content to surrender its traditions to a different culture. In killing the messenger at the end of the novel, Okonkwo was looking to save the culture that had fallen apart long before that moment. And like his culture before him, he fell apart when no one else resisted. Whether or not he had hanged himself, under British rule, he would still have been dead. Works Cited Achebe, Chinua.
...clansmen come to decide what they should do, Okonkwo has already chosen war. As the messenger arrives to order an end to the meeting, Okonkwo is once again driven by his rage and kills the messenger. He realizes that the others were not prepared to fight, and he comes to understand the consequences of his actions. Instead of being executed, Okonkwo decides to take his own life.