Things Fall Apart Unoka's Downfall

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Recommended: Okonkwo as the tragic hero in Chinua. Things fall apart

The protagonist of the novel Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, Okonkwo, is an african man who lives in shame of his father’s failure in life. Through being shamed all of his life, he became very ambitious to be a success. Okonkwo’s success is built upon an extreme ambition, which ultimately leads to his downfall.
His father, Unoka is described as “lazy and improvident and was quite incapable of thinking about tomorrow.”(4) Whenever he received food, instead of using it wisely he will share it and have fun with the neighbors. Unoka is lazy and has skills, but chooses not to use them. He is a skilled flute player and practices instead of working.
Okonkwo, growing up hungry and shamed became very ambitious to not be like his father, lazy and improvident. Okonkwo is a strong, tall and talented young man. He is very well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. He is well known because of his feats in wrestling, the most famous being when he beat Amalinze the Cat. Since he …show more content…

This is because most of the fathers were able to support their children well and Unoka was not able to do that. He is in constant debt and he could never pay it back. Unoka keeps has a method of tracking how many cowries he is in debt. As he says “Each group there represents a debt to someone, and each stroke is one hundred cowries. You see I owe a man a thousand cowries.”(7) The effect of his father being improvident caused Okonkwo to hate everything about him. It is said that “Okonkwo was ruled by one passion - to hate everything that his father loved. One of those things was gentleness and another was idleness.”(13) This is part of such an extreme ambition within him. Due to the fact that he hated gentleness and idleness, he started to believe in rough and active life. This made Okonkwo very successful in life because he was strong and ready to work. His life wasn’t motivated by pure hatred but also by his

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