Chinua Achebe

Perception of Gender Roles A common question concerns what male and female roles in society are and if there is an in-between. In Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe explains the many challenges Okonkwo, a very honorable member from the Umuofia clan, faces with himself about cognitive dissonance. This Nigerian clan constantly revolves life around a deliberate gender role system. Okonkwo dedicates his life to always being masculine due to the fear of becoming a failure like his father Unoka, who did…

personality and other traits.. This can be good or bad. Chinua Achebe makes this an obvious point in Things Fall Apart. Father-son relationships over three generations have the power to influence the personality traits of each son in Achebe’s writing. Unoka, Okonkwo’s father, unintentionally influences Okonkwo’s violent and hardworking personality by motivating him not to be unsuccessful and lazy like himself. In the opening pages, Achebe describes Unoka’s unproductive and idle life of not…

Chinua Achebe’s Literary Analysis “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosened upon the world.” The famous words of W.B Yeats fully represented the tragedy of both wars: war for conformity, and war against the human spirit. If one challenges society’s own rules as well as their own morals, life starts to crumble in both the challenger and the one challenged. Award winning Nigerian novelist, Chinua Achebe, stresses the message through the Umuofia Clan, an Igbo tribe who…

There is an Igbo proverb that goes, “When a man says yes, his chi also says yes” (Achebe 27). Things Fall Apart,by Chinua Achebe, is a story set in the Igbo society of Nigeria about a man who struggles with his chi and trying to change his fate. In the Igbo society, chi is seen as a personal god, almost like karma, that helps a person make the right decisions and keeps them safe if they deserve it. Chi plays a crucial role in understanding the deeper meaning of the events in Things Fall Apart…

Change is a powerful concept. It can make something better, or can make “things fall apart”. In the novel Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe uses the fear of change to portray the idea that “things fall apart” in the lives of the protagonist Okonkwo and the Ibo tribe before and after the arrival of the missionaries. Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe is a powerful novel about the Ibo tribe in Nigeria, and one of its toughest members, Okonkwo. It tells about the lives of the tribe, Okonkwo and his…

Throughout the novel Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, the theme of change is extraordinarily prevalent. The novel starts off with Achebe taking readers through Umuofia, an area of Nigeria in which Igbo people reside, and telling them about their different rituals and beliefs. As the story goes on readers get more familiar with this and begin to understand just how important these customs are to the Igbo and how they impact their lives day to day. Further into the story, however, change begins…

Chinua Achebe reveals the faults within the Ibo society in his novel, Things Fall Apart. The Ibo community is located in Southern Nigeria with “low-lying deltas and riverbank areas [that] are heavily inundated during the rainy season, and are very fertile” (Countries and Their Cultures 1). Okonkwo, the main protagonist in the novel, is obsessed with many things, but specifically the growing of his yams. The reader later discovers that the number of yams a man grows reflects their rank in the…

Chinua Achebe, through the writing of Things Fall Apart, expresses Okonkwo’s character through multiple recurring behaviors of violence, hidden emotion, and impetuous acts. To begin, violence is a positive attribute of everyone within this tribal culture, Okonkwo being a strong warrior he is expected to utilize strength to obtain power over others. Achebe presents this idea of violence to overcome weakness writing “Okonkwo drew his machete and cut him down. He was afraid of being thought weak”…

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe is a novel that takes place in a time of great conflict in a Nigerian village called Umuofia in the 1800’s. The inhabitants of Umuofia, the Ibo, are a very “tribal” type people whom bring a question to the thought of truly is a civilized society. In Things fall apart , the Ibo culture is depicted by the author Chinua Achebe, as being both civilized and uncivilized based on their primitive tribal ways, yet sophisticated social, civil, and justice system. In the…

The Igbo people The author, Chinua Achebe, writes in the novel Things Fall Apart about a Nigerian man named Okonkwo, whose main goal is to not become like his father. The novel starts after he successfully becomes the village wrestling champion at the age of eighteen. After Okonkwo makes a mistake he and his family are forced to leave his village for several years. By the time he and his family returned it had been taken over by Catholic missionaries. Okonkwo and his family in the novel are…