In this passage, the author discusses Okonkwo’s harsh nature. It is revealed that the source of Okonkwo’s cruelness originates from an ever-lasting fear he has of resembling his lazy father. He feels that in order not to resemble his father, he must show no sign of weakness, and therefore must act cruelly towards those around him. This sense of constant fear is underlined as a very important aspect of Okonkwo’s life to the reader. Okonkwo’s fear is emphasized in this passage by the use of an anaphora. For example, statements such as “the fear of evil and capricious gods and of magic, the fear of the forest, and the forces of nature, malevolent, red in tooth and claw” (Achebe 13) use the same three words “the fear of” (13) to introduce
The Dangers of Fear Irish Playwright, George Bernard Shaw, once said, “The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of inhumanity.” Inhumanity is mankind’s worst attribute. Every so often, ordinary humans are driven to the point where they have no choice but to think of themselves. One of the most famous examples used today is the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night demonstrates how fear is a debilitating force that causes people to lose sight of who they once were.
Okonkwo's downfall was predicted from the beginning. The book Thing Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe is about the great warrior Okonkwo who builds his life in the Igbo tribe from the ground up. After adopting a child named Ikemefuna, Okonkwo's life goes downhill. Many things in Okonkwo's life could have caused his own destruction, but there are a few things that could have been bigger than others. I think that Ikemefuna's death played a big part, as well as Nwoye's betrayal, and his father's failure.
Okonkwo’s fear of unmanliness is kindled by his father, who was a lazy, unaccomplished man. Okonkwo strives to have a high status from a young age and eventually achieves it. He has a large family, many yams and is well known throughout the village for his valor. He raises his family by his mentality of manliness and is ...
Achebe uses internal conflict within his protagonist to demonstrate the power of fear. Okonkwo’s fear of becoming like his lackadaisical father is an internal conflict between Okonkwo. “Okonkwo’s fear was greater than these. It was not external but lay deep within himself, lest he should be found to resemble his father.” (Achebe 13). Okonkwo tries to live his life antipodally from his father. Unlike his father, Okonkwo is a hard worker with little debt and a driven personality. His internal fear leads to his decision to beat his wife during the week of peace and to take part in the mandatory action of killing his bel...
Okonkwo is “a man of action, a man of war” (7) and a member of high status in the Igbo village. He holds the prominent position of village clansman due to the fact that he had “shown incredible prowess in two intertribal wars” (5). Okonkwo’s hard work had made him a “wealthy farmer” (5) and a recognized individual amongst the nine villages of Umuofia and beyond. Okonkwo’s tragic flaw isn’t that he was afraid of work, but rather his fear of weakness and failure which stems from his father’s, Unoka, unproductive life and disgraceful death. “Perhaps down in his heart Okonkwo was not a cruel man. But his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and weakness….It was not external but lay deep within himself. It was the fear of himself, lest he should be found to resemble his father.” Okonkwo’s father was a lazy, carefree man whom had a reputation of being “poor and his wife and children had just barely enough to eat... they swore never to lend him any more money because he never paid back.” (5) Unoka had never taught Okonkwo what was right and wrong, and as a result Okonkwo had to interpret how to be a “good man”. Okonkwo’s self-interpretation leads him to conclude that a “good man” was someone who was the exact opposite of his father and therefore anything that his father did was weak and unnecessary.
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.
The foundation of Okonkwo’s fear of failure and weakness stems from the qualities possessed by Okonkwo’s father, Unoka, and his inability to succeed during his life. As a young boy, Okonkwo had always known and resented that his father was essentially the definition of a failure. Throughout Okonkwo’s childhood, he was constantly reminded of the fact that his father was unsuccessful: “... even now he still remembered how he had suffered when a playmate had told him his father was agbala” (Achebe 13). The word agbala has two different meanings, one referring to a woman and the other meaning a man who has taken no titles in the clan. Titles are an important part of the Ibo culture because they show a man’s achievement and success in the clan.
Okonkwo always wanted to be the opposite of his father and by doing so he turned to this emotionless angry man. He asked his second wife where Ojiugo has gone and she replies with “She has gone to plait her hair.” He later asks if Ojiugo told her to feed her children and the second wife lies by saying yes. Okonkwo waits in his hut and when Ojiugo returns he “beat her very heavily. In his anger he had forgotten that it was the Week of Peace.”(Achebe, 29) Okonkwo let one emotion guide him to break such a sacred week and caused him to lose respect in his village. Achebe later states that Okonkwo is “not the man to go about telling his neighbors that he was in error.” meaning that he wasn’t worried that he broke a sacred tradition but rather that if he let this slide he would look
by Chinua Achebe, Okonkwo depicts his masculinity in many different ways, even if it hurts the people closest to him. He feels it is necessary to display his manliness so he does not end up like his father Unoka. “He had no patience with unsuccessful men. He had no patience with his father” (4). Okonkwo correlates virility with aggression and feels the only emotion he should show is anger, leaving him no way to cope with the death of his culture.
Okonkwo’s behavior could be described as violent because he has beat his wives, killed his “son”, and accidentally killed a sixteen year old boy. During the week of peace Okonkwo beat his wife for returning too late to make his dinner. “And when she returned he beat her heavily.”(21) To him it does not matter where he is at, he will be violent anywhere, even if it ruins the occasion. Okonkwo cannot control his violent behavior, or he does not care.
In the first section of the paragraph it is made known that Okonkwo was “…ruled by a great passion - to become one of the lords of the clan.” This was evident at the very beginning of the book by his fear of failure. The loathing he had for his father and what he stood for had driven Okonkwo to work hard through his entire life. This commitment help confirm the manliness that he had be seeking for, the one thing that could separate him from the shame of his childhood. However his strong will and determination has left him with a very egomaniacal self-image that leaves Okonkwo helpless when he actually fails in something. His banishment to Mbantu was a very hard blow to his self-image, leaving him weak and broken while trying to live there.
In Achebe’s book, Okonkwo would be viewed as a very intolerant person as he comes quick to anger and the slightest misdemeanor could lead to a harsh beating. Okwonko showcases this when one of his wives show up late to make his afternoon meal and “when she returned he beat her very heavily” (Achebe 29). Okonkwo later continues to show examples time and time again of how harsh his character truly is. For the boy, however, instead of anger consuming him, he worries. He thought about his father and worried that he would be too tired to play catch with him under the trees, he worried about his room being taken over by large messy people, and he worried about his father returning bald (Otsuka 549). He continues to worry about multiple things later on in the story, showing the side of his character that is very worrisome in a stressful time. Both characters have some sort of way to vent out their stress, but it’s really doing them more harm than good. The cause of this stress leads back to unwanted change, the change of meal time for Okonkwo and the change of how different life is for the boy without his
By enduring his banishment from Umuofia, Okonkwo manifests extensive misery. By being a strong leader in both Umuofia and his motherland, Okonkwo displays his perseverance and high esteem. Nevertheless, his fierce leadership is driven by his detestation of his father and trepidation of failure. Through his sufferings and leadership, Okonkwo personifies the epitome of a tragic
Okonkwo sees his father’s gentleness as a feminine trait. He works hard to be as masculine as possible so that he will be the opposite of his father and overcome the shame his father brought to his family. Okonkwo deals with this struggle throughout the entire book, hiding the intense fear of weakness behind a masculine façade (Nnoromele 149). In order to appear masculine, he is often violent. In his desire to be judged by his own worth and not by the worth of his effeminate father, Okonkwo participates in the killing of a boy he sees as a son, even though his friends and other respected tribe members advise him against it. (Hoegberg 71). Even after the killing of Ikamefuna, Okonkwo hides his feelings of sadness because the emotions are feminine to him. He goes so far as to ask himself, “when did you become a shivering old woman” (Achebe 65), while he is inwardly grieving. The dramatic irony of the secret fears that Okonkwo has will open the reader’s eyes to how important gender identity is to him. This theme is also presented among Okonkwo’s children. He sees his oldest son, Nwoye, as feminine because he does not like to work as hard as his father (Stratton 29). When Nwoye eventually joins the Christian church, Okonkwo sees him as even more feminine. On the other hand, Okonkwo’s
The greatest opponent in life is the one that is created inside the mind. As Okonkwo grows up, he decides to be the absolute antipodes of his father Unoka. Okonkwo perceives his father as a culmination of the weaknesses in man. In this erroneous view, Okonkwo buries his feelings deep within himself. When these emotions emerge, he views them as a sign of weakness. When Okonkwo participates in Ikemefuna's killing, he is deeply affected as he has ended the life of one who he grew to love as a son. Okonkwo is excessively depressed after the slaying, "not tasting any food for two days." (61) As he notices his confusion, he calls himself weak like a shivering old woman. In his emotionless show of strength after Ikemefuna's death, Okonkwo actually proves his frailty by hiding what he feels. Okonkwo is dominated by his private fear of appeari...