Things Fall Apart Perspective Analysis

Superior Essays
The Flop of Perspective

Throughout history, the perspective most often taught is that of the “winner”. When looking at all cases of colonization, the same holds true, and the colonists view on the subject is the most often told. These colonists have portrayed the people of Africa as savages and people without pasts and personalities, yet they characterize themselves as very deep people with long histories. Yet, when taking a deeper look into the actuality and the extreme biases, a different, much more tragic and true story appears. Here enters Chinua Achebe, a writer from Nigeria. In his novel, Things Fall Apart, a different world view is shown, and the loss of a culture and lives becomes apparent. In an argument against the constant bias
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He characterizes the people of the Igbo as having not only deep personalities and histories, but they also have a beautiful and rich culture. His characterization of Okonkwo is a perfect example of an Igbo person’s history and personality being told which is never seen from the colonists perspective. Later in the book, when europeans arrived, he characterizes them and their culture as bland and strange. He makes a contrast to the normal criticism of African religions by attacking that of the westerners, something that is fully absent in textbooks and history classes. Then, his purposely dull indirect and direct characterization of these people is also very clashing to the normal deep characterization normally seen. When colonizers talk, they are perceived immediately in a negative tone through indirect characterization. This is very different to the normal long, heroic, and intelligent passages that they normally give out in the textbooks. This book, Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe, uses characterization as an argument against the one sided story that colonists give as it paints the people of the the Igbo society as having deep histories, rich cultures, and in depth personalities while it characterizes the colonizers as having bland identities, absent histories, and the ones with a strange

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