Okonkwo's Rise And Fall In A Culture example essay topic

KEY LITERARY ELEMENTS SETTING The novel is set during the late 1800's / early 1900's in a small village called Umuofia situated in the southeastern part of Nigeria. The time period is important, as it was a period in colonial history when the British were expanding their influence in Africa, economically, culturally, and politically. Umuofia is an Igbo village with very well defined traditions. It is a village that is respected by those around it as being powerful and rich. Each person has a hut or obi that is located in the center of a compound. Each of the wives has a separate obi with a shed for goats and an attached chicken coop.

The main occupation of the men is sowing and growing yams since yams are considered the most important crop. The women grew less significant crops like coco-yams, beans and cassava. When Okonkwo is banished from his village, he takes his family to his mother's native village called Mbanta, where he is given two or three plots of land to farm, and a plot of ground on which to build his compound. The next seven years of Okonkwo's life are spent in the village of Mbanta. He then returns to Umuofia where the rest of the novel takes place.

CHARACTER LIST Major Characters Okonkwo: The hardy and ambitious leader of the Igbo community. He is a farmer as well as a wrestler, who has earned fame and brought honor to his village by overthrowing Amalinze in a wrestling contest. Still only in his thirties, he has three wives and several children who all live in their own homes in his village compound. Okonkwo has resolved to erase the stigma left on him by his father's laziness and is very successful growing yams. He has very strong economic and political ties to the village and is treated with admiration and respect. Okonkwo is a man of action.

Obierika: Okonkwo's close friend, he helps him with the crops during his period of exile, and keeps him informed of the radical changes taking place in the village. He is a thoughtful man, who questions the traditions of society. He is also Maduka and Ekuke's father. Ekwefi: Okonkwo's second wife, she is the mother of Ezinma, her only living child, whom she will do anything for even if that means defying tradition. Ezinma: Ekwefi and Okonkwo's daughter, she is born after many miscarriages and is loved and pampered by her mother. She has a special relationship with Chielo, the woman who acts as the voice of Agbala, the Oracle.

Okonkwo is fond of her and often wishes that 'she were a boy. ' Nwoye: Okonkwo's son from his first wife. He is a sensitive young man who, much to his father's dismay, joins the Christian missionaries. Ikemefuna: A boy who is bought as hostage from Mbaino, and who lives with Okonkwo for three years. He is a clever and resourceful young man yet comes to an unfortunate end. Chielo: The priestess of Agbala, the Oracle of the Hills and Caves, who carries Ezinma on her back to the caves, saying that Agbala wants to see her.

Uchendu: Okonkwo's maternal uncle with whom he spends seven years of his exile, along with his family. Mr. Brown: The Christian missionary who first introduces the tenets of Christianity to the people to take them away from their superstitious and age-old customs. He is a kind and understanding man who is accommodating towards the Igbo. Reverend James Smith: Mr Brown's successor, he openly condemns Mr. Brown's policy of compromise and accommodation and attempts to efface all aspects of Igbo culture. District Commissioner: The man behind the whole affair, who handcuffs the six leaders of the village and imprisons them. At the end of the novel, he orders his men to take down the dead body of Okonkwo from the tree, and bury it.

Minor Characters: Un oka: Okonkwo's father who during his entire lifetime never lifted his hand to till the earth, and had passed his time playing the flute. Okonkwo always remembers his father's failure and strove to be as different from him as possible. Maduka: Obierika's son who participates and wins the wrestling contest. Ogbuefi Ezendu: The oldest man in Umuofia who forewarns Okonkwo not to get too close to Ikemefuna, since the Oracle had pronounced his death already and then tells him not to participate in his death. He dies a venerated warrior with three titles to his name.

Enoch: The overzealous Christian who tears off the mask of the egwugwu, creating strife in the community. Agbala: The Oracle of the Hills and the Caves, she dispenses advice and overlooks all aspects of life in the village of Umuofia. No one has ever beheld Agbala, except his priestess. Ojiubo: Okonkwo's third wife and mother of several of his children.

CONFLICT: Protagonist: The protagonist of the novel is Okonkwo. The novel describes Okonkwo's rise and fall in a culture that is bound by tradition and superstitious. Okonkwo also has his faults, and it is these faults that lead to his downfall. His impatience and quick temper make him break the rules of the Week of Peace and eventually is ostracized from his village for his rash behavior. His headstrong nature and impulsive attitude consequently bring about his own death at the end of the novel. Okonkwo is respected for having reached a position of wealth and status, without any support from family.

In fact, most of his ambition and desire stems from the rejection of his father's lifestyle that is objectionable to him. Okonkwo refuses to bow down to the tenets of the Christian missionaries, even when almost the entire village has. His tenacity and tragic flaws that he cannot see make him a hero despite his unforgiving nature and rigid adherence to tradition. Okonkwo thus instills a feeling of respect and admiration in the hearts of the readers. Antagonist: The antagonists are the Christian missionaries who wish to invade the content villages of Africa with their Western concepts and way of thinking and convert the people into Christianity.

The customs of African culture are scorned and degraded. Gradually, many people are persuaded into converting themselves into Christianity, with a few exceptions, including Okonkwo. It is the missionaries who are the final cause of the death of Okonkwo. Their behavior toward the leader of the village is disrespectful and it is understandable that Okonkwo had to retaliate in the only form he knows, by resistance to Christianity and loyalty to his culture's traditions. The reader sees the heartlessness of the district commissioner who is only concerned about the material he has accumulated for the book he wishes to publish Climax: The climactic point in the novel arises when, Okonkwo, without his realizing it, shoots a young member of his community and kills him. Though this was an accident, Okonkwo has to abide with the law that deems he should be banished from his village for seven years.

This is an unfortunate situation, since until then Okonkwo has been steadily rising in wealth as well as status in his community and very soon would have acquired more titles. The calamity however results in his downfall. He now has to live in exile for seven long years of his life in his mother's land. Another parallel climax in the novel is when the missionaries inculcate the lives of the villagers.

Until then the people were governed only by the traditional Ibo culture and were custom-bound, but the invasion of the missionaries changes the lives of the villagers tremendously. Outcome: The outcome of the novel is Okonkwo's return to his village after his exile and his self-destruction. He discovers that everything has changed when he is not given the kind of welcome he had expected. Too much has happened since Okwonko's departure and the villagers have other things to worry about. Okonkwo can no longer dream of becoming head of the village because he has lost too many years in exile, and when he returns, all of the customs, values and beliefs of the village have been destroyed. With the invasion of the Christians, the villagers find themselves at a loss.

With their sweet words and strong beliefs, the missionaries manage to dissuade the villagers from their own religion and customs. The Christians even begin living in the evil forest, in order to prove to the villagers that all their beliefs about its evilness are baseless. Twins and outcasts were allowed to enter into their church. The missionaries also provide many good services to the villagers. They build a church, a hospital, a school and also a court and trading store for the villagers. Yet ultimately the core of their culture has been subjugated to Western ideology and the traditional economy as well as social well being of the village is gone forever.

SHORT PLOT / CHAPTER SUMMARY (Synopsis) The novel deals with the rise and fall of Okonkwo, a man from the village of Umuofia. Okonkwo was not born a great man, but he achieved success by his hard work. His father was a lazy man who preferred playing the flute to tending the soil. Okonkwo was opposed to his father's way of life, and always feared failure. In order to prove his ability, he had overthrown the greatest wrestler in nine villages, set himself up with three wives, two barns filled with yams and a reputation for being a hard worker. The reader learns that he was also one of the egwugwu -- the masked spirits of the ancestors.

His importance is proved when he is sent as an emissary to Mbaino in order to negotiate for hostages, and he returns successfully with a boy, Ikemefuna and a virgin. Okonkwo has his faults, one of them being his impatience of less successful men and secondly his pride over his own status. His stern exterior conceals a love for Ikemefuna, who lives with him; an anxiety over his son Nwoye, who seems to take after his father; and an adoration for his daughter Ezinma. His fiery temperament leads to beating his second wife during the Week of Peace.

He even shoots at her with his gun, but luckily he misses. This shows his short temper and a tendency to act on impulse, a tendency that backfires on him later on in the novel. The boy, Ikemefuna, is ordered to death by the Oracle of the Hills and Caves. Though Okonkwo is upset, he shows his fearlessness and impartiality by slaying the boy himself. His final fault against his tribe is when he unintentionally shoots a boy and kills him; for this he is banished from the village for seven years and has to live in his mother's village of Mbanta. This is a great disappointment for him although he is consoled and encouraged by his uncle, Uchendu.

The reader now hears of the arrival of the Christian missionaries, who take over the village of Mbanta, as well as Umuofia, set up a church and proceed to convert the tribesmen to Christianity. At first, they face much resistance, but gradually many of the tribesmen including Okonkwo's own son, Nwoye, are converted and follow the path of Christ. After his period of exile, Okonkwo returns to Umuofia with his family and finds it totally changed. The missionaries have done a lot for the village. Umuofia is prospering economically, but Okonkwo is firm in his refusal to charge his religion.

The missionary Mr. Brown is overzealous in his methods. A Christian named Enoch enters a meeting of the tribe in which the egwugwu is present, and he unmasks one of them. This causes great anger, and the villagers make a decision to destroy the church, which they eventually do. This action incites the wrath of the District Commissioner, who invites Okonkwo along with five other men and overpowers and imprisons them. These elders are humiliated in the prison. On their return, another meeting is held.

The commissioner sends some men to stop the proceedings, and Okonkwo, in a fit of fury, beheads one of them. The tribe is disturbed and they let the other men escape. Finding no more support from his tribesmen, Okonkwo hangs himself. His world has fallen apart. His tribesmen even refuse to cut him down and bury him since taking one's own life is a violation of the earth goddess, and his men would not bury such a man. His friend Obierika's words describe the tragedy most powerfully "That man was one of the greatest men in Umuofia.

You drove him to kill himself; and now he will be buried like a dog". Okonkwo's suicide is symbolic of the self-destruction of the tribe, for he was a symbol of the power and pride that the tribe had and with its demise, the tribe's moral center and structure gave way to a more dominant one. With his death, the old way of life is gone forever. THEMES Major Themes The major theme of the novel is that British colonization and the conversion to Christianity of tribal peoples has destroyed an intricate and traditional age-old way of life in Africa. The administrative apparatus that the British imposed on the cultures of Africa were thought to be just as well as civilizing although in reality they had the opposite effect of being cruel and inhumane practices that subjugated large native populations to the British.

In conjunction with the colonizing practices, Western missionaries endeavored to move native peoples away from the superstitious practices that they perceived as primitive and inhumane and convert them to Christianity. Another important theme that is explored in this book is the fallibility of a man like Okonkwo, who is ambitious and hardworking who believes strongly in his traditions. He wishes to achieve the highest title in his village but ultimately his rash and impetuous behavior leads to his fall. The reader also sees how Okonkwo refuses to break away from his traditional and religious values, which results in his own death. He refuses to conform to the forces of domination and therefore, one feels respect and admiration for such a strong individual. Minor Themes One of the minor Themes that Achebe addresses in this book is the complex and subtle rites and traditions that make up Igbo culture.

Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart in response to representations of Africans as primitive or as "noble savages" by European writers. In his novel, Achebe explodes these Western constructions by presenting a society that is as complex and dynamic as any culture in Western society. His characters are also complex beings rather than stereotypes. It is in fact the white colonialists and missionaries who appear to be one-dimensional. Along with the major theme of the destruction of African culture due to colonization, the readers also see how orthodox traditions and customs rule the people of the society. Absolute loyalty and obedience to the tribal religion is inculcated into the minds of the people from their childhood.

Strict adherence to the laws, as well as gender roles create a community that is extremely close knit, but once this bond is broken, tribal ways give way easily and fall apart. This breakdown of society is seen as tragic as people suffer and communities become divisive. MOOD The title of the book as well as the epigram sets the tone of the novel quite accurately. It comes from a W.B. Yeat's poem called "The Second Coming".

Yeats was a late 19th century Irish poet, essayist, and dramatist. The actual verse that Achebe uses as his epigram is: Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. Chaos and disruption pervade good portions of the novel as well as a sense of life being diminished and changing in ways that cannot be controlled. Throughout the novel, the mood is usually somber and tragic although there are moments of great celebration and joy during village ceremonies such as weddings and the Week of Peace.

The villagers have strong faith and deep beliefs and do not allow any kind of laxness with their customs. Yet during the festival seasons or during the wrestling contests, the people lose some of their inhibitions and enjoy themselves. The novel focuses on the downfall of Okonkwo and often conveys a sense of loss and tragedy. When the reader reads about the egwugwu, the marked representatives of the ancestral spirits, the mood conveyed is extremely dramatic and even frightening.

BACKGROUND INFORMATION - BIOGRAPHY CHINUA ACHEBE Born in 1930, Chinua Achebe occupies a significant place among non-native writers of English; he "is perhaps the most influential writer to have come out of Africa since the late 1950's". He is one of the most important of the African writers and has done much to promote writing in English by editing the African Writers series, published by Heinemann, that gives voice to many diverse voices in Africa. Achebe was born in the Igbo (formerly spelled Ibo) town of Ogi di in southeastern Nigeria. His father was a missionary instructor in catechism where Achebe started his education at the Church Missionary Society's school. For two years the language of instruction was Igbo and it was not until later when he was eight, Achebe started learning English.

Because of this late introduction of English in his life, he was able to develop a pride in his culture and also appreciate his native language. While his father's library was full of books in English, his mother instilled in him a love for traditional storytelling. Nigeria was still a British colony during much of Achebe's youth and because his family spoke English, they held much power in the town. Achebe was educated at Government College, Umuahia and then at University College, Ibadan, where he studied liberal arts. His first stories were published during this period and later become the collection published in 1972 called Girls at War and Other Stories; afterwards he was able to visit Britain and the United States.

Growing nationalism in Nigeria in the forties and fifties also had a tremendous influence on Achebe who changed his English name Albert to the Igbo name Chinua, which is an abbreviated expression for "May a chi fight for me". After graduating college in 1953, he began his career in radio with the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation, and soon became Director of External Broadcasting. It was in London while he was attending the BBC Staff School that he submitted his novel Things Fall Apart to a publisher. It was published by Heinemann in 1958 and fame came practically overnight. Returning to Nigeria, he continued to work for NBC and developed programs that aimed to develop a national consciousness about Nigerian culture and affairs. Because of his creative work, he was invited first by the University of Nigeria, Lagos, and for short periods by the American Universities of Massachusetts and Connecticut to teach.

It is evident that Achebe is a writer who has conscious literary aims and political motives. Well versed in the poetics of Western literature, he utilizes many Western literary genres. In this novel, he relies upon the genre of the English novel, but at the same time manages to weave native elements of African culture such as story telling and proverbs into the narrative. He also employs structural elements of classical Greek tragedy in which a flaw in the protagonist ultimately leads to his downfall. Ultimately, all his books share the theme of two cultures in conflict with each other: that of the West and Africa. The exploitation and colonization of Africa by the West is never overshadowed by the formal aspects of his work.

It is the pivotal theme that gives his writing such a deep and lasting impression on the reader. Chinua Achebe's novels and critical pronouncements have profoundly influenced his readers' understanding of Africans and their lives and have formed the basis for many discussions of 'the African novel. ' Many great English novelists like Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene and E.M. Forster have influenced him, but Achebe transcends these influences and writes with an authentic African consciousness, interpreting his own traditions and culture in a language that is essentially native, the Igbo-derived English. In fact, one of Achebe's greatest achievements is the creation of a prose style that, while incorporating African usage and thought patterns, is fluid, lucid and is in impeccably good English. It is a product of a sophisticated mind thoroughly educated in English language and literature as well as his own native culture.

To his credit, Achebe has written four other major novels since Things Fall Apart. In 1960, he wrote the sequel, No Longer at Ease. In 1964, he wrote Arrow of God and in 1966, A Man of the People. All were written within a comparatively brief span of eight years. His first novel Things Fall Apart is considered to be a literary classic and read all over the English-speaking world. It has been translated into many languages and won him a major literary prize the year after it was published.

Apart from these, he has produced a few essays of critical and sociological interest, like 'English and the African Writer', 'The Novelist as a Teacher' and 'The Role of the African Writer in a New Nation. ' Achebe's work reflects his preoccupation with the sociological and humanistic aspects of his nation, both in past and the present times. It is justified to call Chinua Achebe 'the father of the African novel in English. ' His influence both as a creative writer, political activist, and a critic has been immense. In particular, his use of 'African English,' drawing on proverbs, tales and idioms of traditional Igbo culture has provided a legitimate literary voice of post-colonial Africa to emerge.

Politics and writing share a symbiotic relationship and Achebe believes that the writer should be "at the head of the big social and political issues of contemporary Africa". Many writers from former European-dominated colonies share his view that the writer's role in these new emergent nations should be linked to the social and political welfare of the country. As he claims, "I am a protest writer" and that "any good story, any good novel, should have a message... ". Since the sixties, Achebe has been doing more teaching and lecturing and less fiction writing, although he has published books for the young and has concentrated exclusively on educating them. He also wrote Anthills of the Savannah, which was a finalist for the Booker Prize in England in 1987.

Much of his later writing since the seventies has been wrapped up in the political turmoil of Nigeria which has undergone a series of upheavals and coup d'etats by various political factions. In the sixties, Achebe was targeted for persecution by one of the non-Igbo lead governments as a dissident and so he fled with his family to Eastern Nigeria, which had declared itself an independent state called Biafra. After a bloody civil war, Biafra was defeated and Achebe exiled himself to Europe and then America. Achebe has received many honors, and his fame has spread not only in Africa, but all over the Commonwealth, Europe and America. He has been made a Fellow of the Modern Languages Association of U.S.A. and has been awarded Honorary Doctorates by the Universities of Sterling and Southampton. He has also won the coveted Neil Gunn Fellowship awarded by the Scottish Arts Council.

At present, Chinua Achebe lives with his wife in Annandale, New York where they both teach at Bard College. They have four children. LITERARY INFORMATION The importance of this text can be seen in its worldwide distribution as an authentic narrative about the horrors of the colonialist experience from the eyes of the colonized. This daring perspective brought to the world the figure of Okonkwo, a powerful and respected village elder who cannot single-handedly repel the invasion of foreign culture into his village. The book has been taught in a variety of contexts from cultural history to anthropology to literature and world history classes. Its application to such a number of fields reveals its historical importance in the world.

Things Fall Apart is a tragic and moving story of Okonkwo and the destruction of the village of Umuofia by the colonialist enterprise. This novel reveals colonialism as a traumatic experience common to all former colonial territories. The administration that was implemented endeavored to shift the people away from the superstitious and what they saw as primitive practices of their culture to the supposedly more "civilized" precepts of Christianity. Achebe does not gloss over the cruelty and superstition that prevailed in Igbo culture; in fact, he even shows that it was partly many of the elders' rigid adherence to traditions that seemed inhuman and outdated that paved the way for the disintegration of the tribe and their ultimate fall. In Things Fall Apart, Achebe carefully makes the readers aware that the traditional Igbo culture that Okonkwo claims to represent varied from clan to clan and was very dynamic. Okonkwo's flaw is his rigidity.

Achebe is critical of any culture that is stagnant. Where preservation of the clan or group is the first priority, obsession with cultural traditions can be dangerous. In truth, Things Fall Apart, was not only educating his African readers but Western readers as well. Achebe's achievements in fact was that he communicated meaningfully both with his Western readers, who were for the most part ignorant of the material he was handling, and with those who knew it very intimately. He is perhaps the only African writer to have bridged this gap with complete success as well as delicacy and tact.

Post Colonialist Literature An interesting trend of literature that has emerged in the past thirty years is post colonialism. It is not just a trend but can also be considered a literary style. This kind of writing emerged after the de-colonization of various African, Asian and South American nations by erstwhile European colonial powers Portugal, Spain, France, Germany and Britain and hails from those nations that were colonized. The colonizing experience that the colonized (i.e. the natives) and the colonizers undergo is narrated in such texts. The colonized mainly speak of the trauma, humiliation and slave mentality induced in their psyche. The colonizers write of their own experience which, according to them, is no less traumatizing.

In Things Fall Apart, Achebe writes of the actual moment of colonization with the arrival of missionaries and the administrative apparatus of Britain at the turn of the century. In No Longer at Ease, the legacy of colonization is brought out. His other works describe issues connected with colonization. His peculiarity is that he works in the genre of the English novel although his concerns are mainly African. Another celebrated Nigerian writer is Role Soyinka, who uses theater as a more traditional form to vent his views on the same issues.