Themes And Imagery In Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart

After the white man shows up everything goes south for Okonkwo and his family, Okonkwo accidentally kills a man and is banished for 7 years and he lost everything including his land and his title. Okonkwo is devastated by the loss of his social status and is struck by grief. Achebe wrote, “ Work no longer had for him [Okonkwo] the same pleas... ... middle of paper ... ...s display the topic of suicide but also because Haemon, Queen Eurydice, and Okonkwo all lost something that was precious to them. Okonkwo watched as his village was taken over by the white man and he was helpless to stop it. he tried to rally his fellow tribesmen and attack the christian but his plan failed almost immediately.

Have you ever wondered what would happen when two cultures collide? Well in the novel, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, a culture clash takes place, with the main character Okonkwo’s village being overtaken by Christian white men seeking to influence and change his tribe and possibly other tribes. Okonkwo is one of the respected leaders of his village. When a man from a neighboring village kills one of the women from Okonkwo 's village, a peace settlement requires the son of the man who killed the women to come live in Okonkwo 's village. Unfortunately, a decision is made to kill the boy.

It is decided by the town elders that the boy, Ikemefuna, should be killed in retribution of a woman murdered three years ago. Even after the boy cries out to Okonkwo calling him his father, “…Okonkwo drew his machete and cut him down. He was afraid of being thought weak.”(61) Okonkwo’s culture pushed him to become a heartless man in order to gain respect. At the turn of the century Igbo culture was nearing it’s height of colonization by the British. The British came bearing Christianity, a completely new and different sort of religion.

Things Fall Apart concentrates on the lifetime of the hero of the novel, Okonkwo. As the novel creates Okonkwo coincidentally murders a man and he and his family are ousted from Umuofia. At the season of his outcast white missionaries touch base in Umuofia and attempt to change the town. At the point when Okonkwo comes back to his town he sees different changes that Umuofia has experienced during his outcast. Troubled with the changes, Okonkwo and different villagers meet up to drive the white missionaries out of their territory.

Enraged, Okonkwo kills him with a machete. Realizing that his clan will not go to war against the white men, the proud, devastated Okonkwo hangs himself. Okonkwo’s suicide shows how things are falling apart. He was consistent throughout the entire book and that was his ultimate problem. He did not know how to adapt or compromise to the Europeans entering Nigeria.

Things Fall Apart is all about the “collapse, breaking into pieces, chaos, and confusion” of traditional Igbo culture that suffers at the hand of the white man’s arrival in Umuofia along with his religion. Okonkwo’s own son Nwoye converts to Christianity leaving his own culture bereft because of the suffering he endured after the killing of Ikemefuna, who was a ward left under the care and protection of Okonkwo. As a result, of the accidental killing of a clansmen, Okonkwo was exiled from the village for 7 years and his return back home does very little to uplift his spirits as the village he left 7 years ago was no longer the same. He finds that the new religion has taken over the former one and because of that there is a shift in the

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.

Plot - In Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, the main character adopts a son from another village as payment for the killing of a “daughter of Umuofia.” Three years after later Okonkwo even says he loves Ikemefuna more than his own son. But it is then decreed, by the village spiritual leader, that Ikemefuna must die. Many people walk together and take him out to the woods, but Okonkwo himself ends up being the one to carry it out. Here is Okonkwo killing Ikemefuna: “He heard Ikemefuna cry, “My father they have killed me!” as he ran towards him. Dazed with fear Okonkwo drew his machete and cut him down.

Perhaps the worst consequence of Okonkwo’s actions was the fact that he not only died by suicide and his clan had forsaken him, he died a disgrace like his father. Okonkwo became a bitter exile and spent his life not trying to become like his disgraceful father, when he returned from exile, he tried to rebuild his lost reputation. Instead, in full irony, he dies with a destroyed reputation and shares his father’s fate as a disgrace to his people. Works Cited Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

He lived his life trying to hide his insecurities by taking it out on others, and this lead to a tragic end for Okonkwo. In an attempt to prevent his own image from being tarnished, Okonkwo, on multiple occasions, makes rash decisions that only make matters worse for him. An example of this is when he killed the innocent Christian messenger. This was a very selfish thing to do, and this was the final straw for Okonkwo. Directly after this, he was found dead, hanging from a tree.