"Things Fall Apart" By Chinua Achebe

[Name of the Author]

"Things Fall Apart" By Chinua Achebe

Introduction

To begin with, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart is a very simple and easy read. It should only take maybe a day or two at the most to read. However, for more advanced readers who look deep inside the sentences and phrases of the book, Things Fall Apart is full of hidden meanings. This book is full of metaphors, irony, and similes.

Overall Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart was very interesting. This book tells of an old African society that was faced with the emergence of the modern age of technology. The story is told through the life of Okonkwo, who is a man of high title or status in the clan. Okonkwo is the main character who represents the old ways of the Ibo people. He fights the new religion of Christianity, and he fights the new modern age. In the end Okonkwo dies just as the Ibo people and their culture and old ways die out.

Discussion

The title of this novel is an allusion to the poem "The Second Coming" (1920), by William Butler Yeats. The line indicates that the modern world is losing its coherence and disintegrating into a chaos that will give birth to unforeseeable new forms of power; considered in the context of the entire poem, however, this decline into chaos is the permanent condition of life, which is always falling apart and always being renewed. Achebe draws on this renowned symbolism, applying it not to 20th-century Europe but to 19th-century Africa, specifically to an Ibo (or Igbo) village in the British colonial territory that will eventually become the nation of Nigeria. Achebe's novel is an example of postcolonial literature and testifies to the lasting effects of the colonial experience on those colonized (Muoneke, 1994). For example, the novelist chose to write his masterwork in English, the language of the colonizers, in order to reclaim the right to narrate his people's experience in a manner that diverges from that of earlier colonialist writers such as Joyce Cary and Joseph Conrad. His goal is to tell, as an African, the story of Africa's collision with European culture, and to do so in the language with the greatest political, economic, and cultural influence in the world.

Achebe uses a third-person narrator to tell his story, setting it in the village of Umuofia just before British traders and missionaries begin to transform it. The protagonist is a leading man in the village, Okonkwo. This character represents the old way of Ibo life while also demonstrating that the seeds of its undoing are already present before the colonizers arrive. In this way, Achebe creates a sympathetic yet dispassionate picture of precolonial life: It was not a world of ideal pristine perfection, but it was a coherent and effective form of human social organization. Okonkwo demonstrates both the strengths and weaknesses of that culture (Iyasere, 1998).

Ibo village culture emphasized communal harmony and cooperation but also rewarded individual excellence. Okonkwo is the ...