Literary Conflict In Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart

The backbone of any piece of writing is the type of literary conflict that revolves within it. To truly understand the inner workings of any piece, one must be familiar with the four main types of conflict: Man vs. Man, Man vs. Nature, Man vs. Society, and Man vs. Self. Many literary works include more than one of these forms of conflict, including Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. However, it can be said that Man vs. Man is the most prevalent of these forms within this work. The Man vs. Man conflict form in Things Fall Apart covers the relationship between the main character, Okonkwo, and his first son, Nwoye. In the novel, Okonkwo and Nwoye’s relationship is challenged by Okonkwo 's hyper masculine standards, the loss of Ikemefuna, and the introduction of Christianity to Ibo society.
Within the Ibo culture a man’s status is determined by his personal accomplishments as those with more accomplishments often have more money. Such accomplishments usually involve a physical feat like Okonkwo’s victory over Amalinze the Cat, a great wrestler who was unbeaten through the clans for 7 years; Okonkwo’s success as a warrior, he had taken 5 heads of war …show more content…
A disappointment to his father, Nwoye finds solace in the hymns of the Evangelists. For him, his father represented the masculine ideals and traditions of Ibo society, and so, in his failure to reach his father’s standards, he also failed to feel at home within the culture he was born to. The evangelists presented a society that would accept him, one whose own hymns appealed to the doubts he had about his clan 's traditions, describing, “brothers who sat in darkness and in fear seemed to answer...the question of Ikemefuna who was killed” (Achebe 147). By his fear of what Nwoye might fail to become, Okonkwo ended up ensuring Nwoye’s failure. And so, Nwoye become a Christian and Okonkwo disowned