No Tragic Hero in Things Fall Apart
According to Aristotle a tragedy is "a drama...which recounts an important and casually related series of events in the life of a person of significance, such events culminating in an unhappy catastrophe, the whole treated with great dignity and seriousness." The novel Things Fall Apart, written by Chinua Achebe begins as a story about the life of a man named Okonkwo. It recounts the events beginning with his childhood and ending with his death. Part I of the novel is about Okonkwo, his family, and the customs and culture of his clan. In Part II the white men came from England, bringing with them their own culture, religion, and government. Part III focuses on the struggle between the clansmen and the missionaries. Okonkwos pride, ambition and overconfidence play a large part in the fight for freedom. According to Arthur Miller, "the tragic feeling is evoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing - his sense of personal dignity... Tragedy, then is the consequence of a man's total compulsion to evaluate himself justly."
In the end of Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo does die for his cause, however whether or not his death can be classified as heroic is debatable. As the village was having a meeting as to what must be done in response to the invasion, they were confronted with five court messengers. The head messenger demanded passage, and was confronted by Okonkwo. When the messenger ordered the meeting to stop, Okonkwo drew his machete and beheaded the man. The next day the district commissioner arrived to take Okonkwo away, only to find that Okonkwo had hung himself. It can be a...
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...ncluded that Achebe purposely ended Okonkwos life in this way in order to convey to the reader a sense of depravity; to leave the book lacking. The end lacks an ending. The District Commissioner merely mentions that he may be able to use the story of Okonkwo to fill a paragraph of the book he is writing. This statement completely diminishes the importance of Okonkwos life; perhaps in an effort to relate the way that these people and this culture has been tossed away and ultimately forgotten, aside from the occasional
paragraph in some random, meaningless book. An ending truly tragic.
Works Cited
Hibbard, Holman, Thrall. Excerpts from: A Handbook to Literature, "Aristotelian Tragedy".
Miller, Arthur. "Tragedy and the Common Man," (an excerpt from the preface prepared by Miller for Death of a Salesman.), 1949
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.
A life without a responsible father is a life one will regret. Without a parent’s responsibility, the children grow up having internal struggles. Such happens in the novel, Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe, when the protagonist, Okonkwo, had a substandard relationship with his father, Unkoka, who was an improvident and foolhardy man with no title. In Umuofia, a father is supposed to teach the children right and wrong, and in this case, the lessons were not taught, but self-learned. As Okonkwo gets older, so does his fear of being a failure, like him. He grows up to be a tough and fibrous man who loathes anything that has to do with his father; be it failure, men with no titles, or even men who show their emotions. Because of his fear for weakness, he murdered his adopted son, Ikemefuna. Achebe included the murder in order to prove that Okonkwo is strong yet fearful.
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.
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.
One of the central themes that Achebe developed in his book “Things Fall Apart” is the contrast between feminine and masculine in the African tribes, more specifically Umofia. In the Ibo culture the gender difference plays an important role in Umofian people’s daily life, and has become one of the centric themes of Achebe’s book. This masculinity vs femininity theme has developed through novels protagonist, Okonkwo, by explaining his different reactions toward folktales, sports, and farming.
The struggle between custom values and conversion is a universally applied theme to Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. The fable like, tragic tone of the work was set off from the very first page. The verb FALL APART has 4 senses to lose one's emotional or mental composure, go to pieces, break or fall apart into fragments, and to become separated into pieces or fragments. These are all exemplified in the novel Things Fall Apart. Okonkwo is a tragic hero in the traditional sense. His fate was decided for him and was unavoidable. Okonkwo’s inability to act rationally and express his feelings in a anthropological manner leads to his inescapable demise. Okonkwo exhibits the characteristics of a tragic hero not only by encompassing an unexceptional flaw. Okonkwo not only developed this flaw because of his erroneous equivalence of masculinity with being filled with relentless fury, vehemence, and impetuousness, but also because he leads to his own self-annihilation.
Through self-centered and narcissistic characters, Emily Bronte’s classic novel, “Wuthering Heights” illustrates a deliberate and poetic understanding of what greed is. Encouraged by love, fear, and revenge, Catherine Earnshaw, Heathcliff, and Linton Heathcliff all commit a sin called selfishness.
In a failed attempt to discourage Isabella Linton’s budding desire for Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Nelly Dean does not hesitate in standing behind Catherine’s assertion that he would destroy Isabella if she were to pursue him romantically: “She is better acquainted with his heart than I, or any one besides,” Nelly warns, “and she would never represent him as worse than he is” (103). While Nelly’s plea falls upon deaf ears, her admission rings true—if there is anyone in Wuthering Heights with more insight on Heathcliff’s actions and motives, it is Catherine Earnshaw. Had Brontë aimed to interrogate Heathcliff’s individual growth and regression in Wuthering Heights, Catherine may have narrated the tale, but as the original
Miller, Arthur. “Death of a Salesman.” The Norton Introduction to Literature 10. New York: W. W.
Suicide is regarded as a grave sin and a shameful way of dying, and any man who commits suicide is seen as a failure and a failure. Okonkwo is just that: a failure and a weakness. Okonkwo spends his whole life trying to be seen as a success and continuously performs acts of strength, even though he sometimes has to pay a price for it. In the end he pays the highest price of all, which is his life, and all his efforts to be successful become useless. He is now a shame and a failure in the eyes of his clan, just as his father had been.
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.
To Conclude, Okonkwo had began his life out strong. Raising himself, and learning right from wrong. By having a role model like his father to show him what not to do with life, influenced him and put a great impact on his life. Upon reaching Umofia, he met the missionaries. The missionaries changed and impacted his life also. They showed him attitude and how to care less about individuals. Okonkwo had many rough spots in his life and was put through a lot. Overall Okonkwo was a very strong character. He stayed strong for as long as he could until he could no longer fight for himself and had ended it all.
Okonkwo, in Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, was faced with many hardships in his life. When growing up he had to deal with a lazy father, then when he was older he had to kill a boy that called him father, and he also accidentally killed a young boy from his village. These events played a very tragic role in Okonkwos life.
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.
Okonkwo takes his life as he sees himself a lone warrior in a society of weaklings. This isolation is truly imposed by his decision of how to handle the conflicts which he encounters. His unitary channeling of emotions, cultural inflexibility, and tendency to seek physical confrontation are compiled into a single notion. The idealized vision of a warrior by which Okonkwo lives is the instrument that leads to the climax of Achebe's novel, Things Fall Apart: Okonkwo's demise.