Literary Interpretation of Things Fall Apart Growing up a poor boy in a poor country is hard. When you dad’s the village fool, it makes it even worse; your sense of worth is low, and you must fight every day to rectify the mistakes of your father and prove your own worth basically reestablishing your name as one of truth and goodness. You must work twice as hard for half the reward as Okonkwo does to establish himself as a different person than his father. Making the choice to be a different man; he made good business decisions, worked tirelessly and raised his children with a strict set of rules he never had. Motivated purely by the ceaseless though of being better than his father, or at least being perceived as better. Being so focused and narrow-minded you can lose sight of the importance of your family and their wellbeing, leading to everything falling apart. Beginning Okonkwo’s malevolence for his father is all consuming; he ridicules men for almost …show more content…
The streak of terrible luck continues for Okonkwo as he pays his final respect to his recently deceased friend and elder of the village, Ezeudu. During the final events of the elaborate funeral, Okonkwo’s gun explodes and kills Ezeudu’s 16 year old son. Killing a clansman whether inadvertent or intentional is forbidden, with no choice but to flee, Okonkwo packs up the family and leaves before the sun rises the next day for his homeland; for a period of not less than 7 years, he is forbidden from returning to his home. Okonkwo spends his time in Mbanta daydreaming of the time when he triumphantly returns to Umuofia, fantasizing about the hero’s welcome he’ll receive when he gloriously returns to his home, where he will quickly resume his previous position as leader of the town, rebuild and expand the family’s compound and add new wives. Still too preoccupied fantasizing to recognize his son pulling further and further away, his obsessive and delusional thoughts are blinding
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 ...
Thus, Okonkwo becomes a tragic hero, and at the end of the book, he takes his own life to end his pain. Okonkwo a man in disguise is a victim of wrong choices in life and dies for it as a noble purpose. Okonkwo is a human being and with that comes the result in fatal flaws that result in his downfall. High birth is not of Okonkwo’s back ground, but ultimately his actions affect Umuofia in more ways than he could ever understand. Okonkwo not only is a tragic hero, he is also a victim of his own fate and destiny.
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.
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.
Due to this fear, Okonkwo is unwilling to conform to the changes of Umuofia once the missionaries arrive. Okonkwo is incapable of self-acceptance. He bases his success and failure on his father’s and successively puts those same pressures on his children, leading Nwoye to hate his own father. Okonkwo cannot cope with the evolution of the tribe and village when the white men arrive which eventually makes his world “fall apart.” He feels he has no place in the “new” village and the old traditions are as unnecessary as he is. Since Okonkwo measures himself and others by standards that are no longer valid, he feels unimportant, which led him to commit suicide. Okonkwo fulfills his gender expectations in the society effectively by repeatedly demonstrating his assertive nature and proving his masculinity, which shows beyond doubt that he possesses the perfect and ideal nature of the standard Ibo man. Nevertheless, as the society changes, as well as its expectations, Okonkwo fails to do so, leading to his eventual
He did not have a father to look up to but rather one he did not want to be associated with. Okonkwo tried unberably hard not to turn out the way his father did because he was concidered lazy and owed a lot of people money. Okonkwo wanted to be the opposite, he wanted to be a strong man, having everything in his control with many wives and titles. He wanted to be liked and to be a big man. He thought that if he would not be a big man he would have turned out the way his father did.
In his work Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe tells a story describing the decay and destruction of ancient African tradition caused by the invasion of white culture. His tone in the book seems to side and sympathize with the Africans and their religion. Interestingly enough, though, he uses biblical allusion, as well as onomatopoeia and symbolism to bring the book to life and captivate the reader. The following will describe how he uses these.
Their beliefs are completely opposite each other because of Okonkwo's need to fulfill his own pressures and ideal image, which he burdens himself with. Certain characteristics he holds which his father does not is seriousness, determination, and brutality. Okonkwo cannot move on from his past, instead he forces his future to be effected by his past, which results in his emotional separation from others around him. Oknonkwo describes his father as "lazy, improvident and quite incapable of thinking about tomorrow.
In the book it is described how everything he does is quite contrary to his father’s actions since these were something to be ashamed of and Okonkwo thought of his father as an efulefu, meaning worthless man. He does everything in his power to become nothing like him resulting in a high social status, a big family and enormous amounts of crops. Therefore when the white men come and Okonkwo realizes that no one in the village will fight back he loses everything he belives in, in a way becoming his father which is one of the reasons to his tragic end.
“With a father like Unoka, Okonkwo did not have the start in life which many young men had. He neither inherited a barn nor a title, or even a young wife. But in spite of these disadvantages, he had begun even in his father’s lifetime to lay the foundations of a prosperous future” (18). Most of his accomplishments were despite his father, whom Okonkwo loathed, but with whom I connected. In the novel, I relate more to Okonkwo’s father, Unoka, a much more laid back character. Like Unoka, I am in love with life, lazy, not worried about tomorrow, and deeply in debt.
Though Okonkwo’s rise to becoming a lord of his clan was sudden and glorious, a ongoing internal battled brewed in Okonkwo. “One passion that Okonkwo had was to hate everything that Unoka had loved. One of these things was gentleness” (Achebe ____). Expanding on the quote above, Okonkwo’s father, Unoka, was a peace loving man who did not seem to do much except add on his already gargantuan fees to the village. Despising his father, Okonkwo swore to indefinitely be polar opposites to what his father was, avoiding and abolishing weakness and failure throughout his life, therefore furthering the relationship Okonkwo shares with the reader.
Although the reader feels remorseful for Okonkwo’s tragic childhood life. It is another reason to sympathize with a man who believes he is powerful and respected by many when in reality, he is feared by his own family and that is another reason that leads Okonkwo to his downfall. He started positive, motivated but down the line, Okonkwo treats his wife and children very harshly. When the author mentioned, “Okonkwo ruled his household with a heavy hand. His wives, especially the youngest, lived in perpetual fear of his fiery temper, and so did his little children” (pg.13).
There are many lessons that we learn in life. Chinua Achebe?s Things Fall Apart teaches one of life?s greatest lesson. True, lasting happiness matters more than ones social rank or ones rank of wealth. Okonkwo, who is the main character in this book, is trying his best to be the man that is father was not. His father was a well known bum and a man who owed a lot of debts. Okonkwo felt that men are always suppose to be strong, leaders, and do what people perceive are typical male tasks. But his father, Unoka, did not fit his description of what he felt a real man should be. He was ashamed of his father.
From an early age, Okonkwo was ashamed of his father, Unoka, who was unable even to feed his family. The unpredictability of receiving enough food at a young age was enough to inspire fear and embarrassment in Okonkwo who associated this embarrassment with his father and was given further justification for these feelings when he went out into Umuofia, discovering that the other villagers held similar opinions of Unoka. When he was old enough, Okonkwo began farming his own yams because “he had to support his mother and two sisters […] And supporting his mother also meant supporting his father” (25). Okonkwo’s self-reliance was admired, valued in the community where “age was respected […] but achievement was revered” (12); this admiration gave him feelings of security, and the respect of his peers pushed him towards greater self-respect, distancing him from his father. The security and respect became related in his mind as he viewed his acceptance in the community as his life’s goal and Okonk...
Okonkwo is a self-made man. He achieves greatness through his own hard work and determination. Okonkwo started his life without the benefits that other young men had. His father, Unoka, was a lazy man. He had acquired no honorary titles. When Unoka died, Okonkwo did not inherit any barn, title, or young wife. He merely acquired his father’s debts. Therefore, Okonkwo sets about to make a name for himself and to achieve greatness in his community. He diligently plants and harvests his yams, building a farm from scratch. He builds a large commune for his family. He marries three wives; one of them was the village beauty. He acquires two titles. Okonkwo is not a failure, like is father was. In Umuofia, “achievement was revered”, and Okonkwo’s achievement was immense (8). He was “clearly cut out for great things” (8). To the Igbo people, Okonkwo epitomizes greatness and success.