The effects of a fear for failure is shown in both Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. In both novels, characters are confronted by arduous obstacles and in self-interest foolishly make choices that affects the people around them. In Things Fall Apart, African warlord Okonkwo struggles with his father’s failures, and the idea of becoming like him drives Okonkwo to become the exact opposite of him. This notion causes Okonkwo to become obsessed with masculinity, and abuse those he thinks are weak, including members of his own family. In Grapes of Wrath, the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression makes workers fear for their nation’s economic stability and their own well-being, thus causing them to selfishly fend for themselves, even if that means hurting others. A fear for failure causes characters, in both books, to irrationally make decisions. …show more content…
In Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo strived to be the adverse of his father; however, his motives were often too radical. For instance, Okonkwo believed that any signs of emotion or affection meant weakness. This caused him to constantly abuse his wives and children, even slaughtering one of his favorite [adoptive] sons because he feared helping would show he cared, and in Okonkwo’s eyes, was weak. Ironically, his father was an inefficient father which Okonkwo became - and in the end, Okonkwo hangs himself which is one of the most disrespectful fates in African
Overtime individuals endure opposition, be it personal or societal, but the conflict against opposing forces can lead to the strengthening of unifying forces. Such an idea is expressed in Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck - a historical fiction following the family of Joads, along with thousands of others, who are forced from their agrarian, single-farmer lifestyle into a trek across the United States in hopes of finding jobs, land, and a better future. Set during the Great Depression, Steinbeck emulates the experiences of farmers during the Dust Bowl, in which millions of acres of crops withered and died in the lack of rain. The Joads find themselves in a fight against losing their land and the elements, consequently, are in a fight for family,
During the early 1920s to late 1940s, people in the whole world suffered from the two darkest periods in the humankind history. One period was, from 1929 to 1932, the longest and deepest economical depression, the Great Depression. The other, right after that, was the most widespread and deadliest total war, the Second World War. In those periods, people were devastated; millions of millions people died, some died from hunger, others died in the war. Some survived, but they surrendered; lived like a walking dead. The physical harm was not deadly enough for people, but the mental harm was. Those people who did not have a strong sense of love, moral, or spiritual belief died mentally. They were, weak-minded and shiftless, the ‘sheep’. In contrast, there were the real ‘goats’; they were enduring and constructive. They fought against the evil and followed their beliefs tight to avoid being lost in the dark. These people knew how precious love, moral, or belief could be in the adversity and, thus, made an utmost effort to uphold these senses. Whether one can hold one’s own in adversity depends on how strong one’s love, moral, or belief are.
drop their life and move to a different state. When they arrived in California they were not
The Grapes of Wrath is a novel written by John Steinbeck, which focuses on an Oklahoman family that is evicted from their farm during an era of depression caused by the Dust Bowl. The Joad family alongside thousands of other refugees (also affected by the dirty thirties) migrates west towards California seeking employment and a new home. John Steinbeck’s purpose for writing this novel was to inform his audience of how many of their fellow Americans were being mistreated and of the tribulations they faced in order to attain regain what they once had. As a result, The Grapes of Wrath triggered its audience’s sympathy for the plight of the Dust Bowl farmers and their families.
Portrait of Fear in The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck shows throughout The Grapes of Wrath that mankind is afraid of failure. Although that fear is present in both the desperate migrant workers and the big, ruthless land owners, Steinbeck uses Al Joad's character to his full advantage to model this characteristic of man. Al's personal fear of failure motivates him to do well in life in comparison to his male role models, as well as to help support the family.
The “Grapes of Wrath” is an American allegory of human suffering that takes place in a dark period of the history of our nation, brought on by the Dust Bowl migration from Oklahoma, Texas, and Arkansas, during the 1930s and the depression. People experience this tragedy in different ways. The landowner who had to remove the families was torn in turmoil; Steinbeck writes, “ Some of the owner men were kind because they hated what they had to do and some of them were angry because they hated to be cruel, and some of them were cold because they had long ago found that one could not be an owner unless one were cold.” Others found ways to be apathe...
The decaying state of the American economy and the onset of the Great Depression in the 1930s brought about the necessity for the United States to reconsider its attitudes and examine the long term effects of its policies concerning wide-scale socioeconomic problems that were constantly growing bigger. The Great Depression led to the creation of many new and innovative government policies and programs, along with revisions to older economic systems. However, these cost the government billions of dollars in a country that had consistently been stretching the gap between the rich and poor. This continued as the Great Depression began to change everything people had grown old knowing, and it forced everyone to deal with dramatic alterations to their lives that left them with no options except acceptance. America then witnessed the mass migration of farmers from the Dust Bowl out to the west towards California and the required intervention by the federal government in stepping up and taking responsibility for the socioeconomic issues plaguing the disintegrating nation. This was profoundly illustrated throughout John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.
In these few chapters that we read, we have already learned a lot about Okonkwo, his life, and how he shows sympathy to some, but to others he is heartless. Okonkwo is other wise known as an unsympathetic person. Okonkwo is a clan leader of umuofia who holds many titles and is well known among his people. Okonkwo's daily life consists of tending to the three yam farms he has produced and to make numerous offerings to numerous gods and to help himself and his family. Okonkwo's personality is hard driven, since his father did not provide for him and his family Okonkwo had to start man hood early and this led him to be very successful in his adulthood, Okonkwo is an unsympathetic character who only shows sympathy rarely because he believes it's a sign of weakness Okonkwo's family relationships make him a sympathetic character because when his children show signs of manliness or do their jobs right he shows sympathy towards them. He is an unsympathetic character because whenever he get a little mad he has to take his anger out on something and that is usually vented by beating his wife's.
John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath in response to the Great Depression. Steinbeck's intentions were to publicize the movements of a fictional family affected by the Dust Bowl that was forced to move from their homestead. Also a purpose of Steinbeck's was to criticize the hard realities of a dichotomized American society.
Having watched the movie "Grapes of Wrath", I have been given the opportunity to see the troubles that would have befell migrant workers during the Great Depression. Though the Joads were a fictitious family, I was able to identify with many signs of hope that they could hold onto. Some of these families who made the journey in real life carried on when all they had was hope. The three major signs of hope which I discovered were, overcoming adversity, finding jobs, and completing the journey.
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.
Both characters have life goals before the fall. “In Things Fall Apart, Achebe makes it clear that Okonkwo’s single passion was ‘to become one of the lords of the clan’. According to Achebe, it was Okonkwo’s ‘life spring.’ Okonkwo wanted to be a hero,” claims Nnoromele (41). In becoming a great man and hero he must overcome the shame his father has left upon him. His father was lazy and had no titles. This helps motivate him on the road to heroism.
In the novel Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo is portrayed as a respected and determined individual whose fatal flaw eventually works against him. Throughout the novel the readers are shown that Okonkwo has many of these Characteristics because he is obsessed with the idea of becoming just like his father. This becomes his flaw in the novel that puts him into exile and makes it hard for him to adjust to the changes that were made with in his village.
Okonkwo was ashamed of him and did everything possible to never end up like his father. When the narrator stated, “With a father like Unoka, Okonkwo did not have the start in life which many young men had. But he threw himself into it like one possessed. And indeed he was possessed by the fear of his father’s contemptible life and shameful death” (pg. 18). The.
In Things Fall Apart, the reader follows the troubles of the main character Okonkwo, a tragic hero whose flaw includes the fact that "his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness" (2865). For Okonkwo, his father Unoka was the essence of failure and weakness.