Comparing Retribution in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Roy’s The God Of Small Things
A close look at two novels, Things Fall Apart, and The God Of Small Things, reveals examples of how their authors illustrate that fate supplies retribution for wrongs done. In Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart, there are three linked instances of this type of retribution. First, Ikemefuna details an innocent young man who is unknowingly punished for the crime of another person. Second, Okonkwo is exiled from his village for an accidental crime. Achebe suggests that this is more than coincidence, that this is repayment for his intentional murder of the boy who called him “father.” Finally, it is suggested that this punishment is also a consequence of his excessive pride. Without Okonkwo’s fear of weakness, he could have avoided killing the innocent Ikemefuna. In a completely different continent and time period, Arundhati Roy’s novel The God Of Small Things expresses very similar occurrences of retribution. In Roy’s novel, three people’s lives are altered for the worse because of their involvement in two deaths. Ammu makes selfish and hasty decisions that end up coming back to haunt both her and her children. This in turn influences her children to make similar decisions, which prolong the cycle of punishment in their lives.
The first instance of fated punishment we find in Achebe’s novel, Things Fall Apart, is in the death of a teenage boy, Ikemefuna. In this particular example, the burden of the crime is not borne by the guilty party. Ikemefuna, innocent of any crime himself, is forced from his village as payment for the crime of a member of his Mbaino community. More specifically, Ikemefuna’s father was involved i...
... middle of paper ...
...ish. After all, they are set on different continents, and in different time periods. However it is clear that Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe, and The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy in truth, share a great deal of common ground. On multiple occasions in each novel, characters experience a grave twist of fate that can be attributed to the selfish actions of themselves or someone close to them. This explains why the most interesting similarity these two novels share is the underlying tension, and tone of fated retribution that is detailed above.
Works Cited
1. Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Twentieth Century. Ed. M. H. Abrams. W. W. Norton &Co. Inc.: New York, 2000. 2617-2706.
2. Roy, Arundhati. The God Of Small Things. HarperCollins Publishers Inc.: New York, 1997.
Shale gas is a kind of unconventional nature gas, which is trapped or gathered in the dark shale or carbon rock. The rock layer has low permeability and low porosity, which means that the best way to get this recourse is fracturing to enhance connectivity and porosity. The shale gas reservoirs are mainly located in North America, Central Asia, China, Latin America, Middle East, North Africa and Russia and other countries and regions. The United State and Canada are only two countries, which have significant shale gas production.
After natural gas forms, it then rises to the top of the surface through the pores spaces in the rock because of its low density compared to the surrounding rock.
Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. First Anchor Books Edition. New York, NY: Random House, Inc., 1959. Print.
Stillinger, Jack, Deidre Lynch, Stephen Greenblatt, and M H. Abrams. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume D. New York, N.Y: W.W. Norton & Co, 2006. Print.
Abrams, M.H., et al. ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 6th ed. 2 Vols. New York: Norton, 1993.
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe is an African novel which happened in 19th Century. Achebe narrates the story mainly about Okonkwo’s whole life in one of the nine villages called Umuofia in Nigeria and the clashes as well as influences to the village from colonization of Europeans. The clashes include reactions and misconception after the first arrival of white people and the effect which missionaries bring about to the village from many aspects such as belief, family and culture. Beyond that, there are large amount of description of the background and details of the villagers’ daily lives are provided to readers for acquainting with Ibo culture. As a consequence, the changes which white people bring about to the village are vivid and unimaginable compared with their previous peaceful life. The conflicts generate from violence and misunderstanding between the Europeans and villagers with addition of colonial process among villages which lead to replacement of Christian domination rather than the Ibo culture.
Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. 1958. The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, Expanded Edition, Vol. 1. Ed. Maynard Mack. London: Norton, 1995.
The 14th century is ranked as one of the most distressing epochs in the history of Western culture. With the transformation of the Holy Roman Empire into a greatly destabilized elective monarchy, the transfer in political power from Germany to France and the escalation of England's power comes the end of the High Middle Ages in which Europe sank into a time of despair. Many events were responsible for this decline and loss of hope. Among them, three deserve special attention: the Great Schism, the Hundred Years War, and the Black Plague.
Abrams, M.H., ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 6th ed. Vol. 2. New York: Norton, 1993.
Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. Ed. Edel Rodriquez. New York: Reed Consumer Books. 1994. Print 3-209
Abrams, M. H., et al., The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Vol. 1. New York: Norton, 1986.
Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart to be an antithesis to much of European literature, and his characterization of Okonkwo as almost a tragic hero serves that purpose. Because Okonkwo has similarities to Oedipus and others, such as Thyestes or Hamlet, he shows Western readers that Africans and members of other marginalized cultures are not completely foreign. As a corollary, Okonkwo 's failures to meet some of the qualities of a tragic hero demonstrate the failure of the mainly Western archetype to represent universal standards, a main point for postcolonialist writers. However, just because Okonkwo is an inversion of the traditional tragic hero does not mean that the archetype cannot hold for cultures outside of Europe; instead, it merely means that archetypes can be modified to create more literary variety in the same way that novels written by Africans, Europeans, and other cultures introduce essential diversity into the literary
In Chinua Achebe 's classic novel "Things Fall Apart," the development of European colonization 's lead to extreme cultural changes, leaving a lasting impact on the Igbo village of Umofia in West Africa. In the novel, Achebe displays the impacts of European colonization in both critical and sympathetic terms to provide the reader with both positive and negative factors of Imperialism to develop an unbiased understanding of what the Igbo culture and society went through. While addressing the hardship 's of life by showing the deterioration of Okonkwo 's character, the cultural and traditional changes of society, and the positive and negative impacts of imperialism, Achebe keeps touch on the overall theme of the novel, once a dramatic event
Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. New York, New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc., 1994.
Greenberg, Jonathan. "Okonkwo and the Storyteller: Death, Accident, and Meaning in Chinua Achebe and Walter Benjamin." Contemporary Literature. 48.3 (2007): 423-450. Print. < http://www.jstor.org/stable/27563759>.