Achebe`s Things Fall Apart- diagnosis of decay

Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. The first of these stories traces Okonkwo's fall from grace with the tribal world in which he lives, and in its classical purity of line and economical beauty it provides us with a powerful fable about the immemorial conflict between the individual and society.

The second story, which is as modern as the first is ancient, and which elevates the book to a tragic plane, concerns the clash of cultures and the destruction of Okonkwo's world through the arrival of aggressive, proselytizing European missionaries. These twin dramas are perfectly harmonized, and they are modulated by an awareness capable of encompassing at once the life of nature, human history, and the mysterious compulsions of the soul. Paperback , pages.

Published September 1st by Anchor Books first published The African Trilogy 1. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about Things Fall Apart , please sign up. This is the worst thing I have ever freaking read. I don't give a dang about yams? Cynthia What do you think is a major commodity of whatever culture you live in that others might find uninteresting or not fully understand why it is …more What do you think is a major commodity of whatever culture you live in that others might find uninteresting or not fully understand why it is important to you?

What else about the book can you relate to? It might be useful to consider those and then find a way to understand the culture in relation to those aspects that you do find familiar, such as family relations the alienation of son and father , women's roles very circumscribed , the idea of disappointment in one's life expectations for females and males , feeling the need to do something different than and be someone different from one's parents, points where education and culture clash, and so on.

I had some trouble with reading this the way I read fiction about and from my culture, but I realized that is one way in which cultures clash--not understanding that we communicate in different ways I discuss this more in my review of the book. I am reading this book for an english assignment and was wondering if the book was boring? Virginia Pulver Joshua and Maaya - I read widely and well when I was young and frankly, now that I have had more life experience and education, I find those very same …more Joshua and Maaya - I read widely and well when I was young and frankly, now that I have had more life experience and education, I find those very same books take on a new depth and power.

Books that I simply rolled my eyes at have now become rich, insightful gifts. Persepctive certainly changes as one ages. Perhaps you will grow into this powerful fable about falling from grace. Keep reading, keep growing and enjoying good books. See all 30 questions about Things Fall Apart…. Lists with This Book. Apr 06, Madeline rated it did not like it Shelves: Focus on the plot and how nothing very interesting really happens.

Stress that it was only your opinion that nothing interesting happens, so that everyone realizes that you just can't identify with any of the events described, and this is your fault only. Explain gently and with examples that bestowing daddy issues on a flawed protagonist is not a sufficient excuse for all of the character's flaws, and is a dev How To Criticize Things Fall Apart Without Sounding Like A Racist Imperialist: Explain gently and with examples that bestowing daddy issues on a flawed protagonist is not a sufficient excuse for all of the character's flaws, and is a device that has been overused ad naseum.

Also explain how the main character is a generic bully, with no unique characteristics that make him interesting to the reader. Do not criticize the rampant misongyny present in the book. It is part of the culture, and is therefore beyond criticism by you because you are not in a position to understand or comdemn what you have not experienced directly.

Do not say that the frequent use of untranslated words and confusing names that were often very similar made the story and characters hard to keep track of at times.

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Achebe is being forced to write in English, a foreign tongue , because he is a post-colonial writer and the fact that the book is written in English stresses his role as a repressed minority, something that you are incapable of understanding, you racist imperialist! View all comments. Their sound was no longer a separate thing from the living village. It was like the pulsation of its heart. It throbbed in the air, in the sunshine, and even in the trees, and filled the village with excitement. Okonkwo is one of the most intriguing characters in African fiction.

This book really takes the reader into the Igbo culture. Achebe shows the traditional culture very well, a culture which is rife with superstition but rich in context. I loved the inclusion of the African proverbs and folk tales, and the details of the Igbo clan system. Achebe also shows how tightknit precolonial African culture was and how, despite not having the so-called civilized institutions, things went pretty smoothly because of the community spirit and also the societal rules.

The importance of ancestors in society is a part of this: There was coming and going between them. For example, in this book the outcasts and the parents of twin babies who had to kill their babies to prevent evil from entering the village obviously found it easier to abandon tradition.

I think this book was the first one that made me realize the terrible impact of colonialism. I would highly recommend both of them. View all 46 comments. Dec 24, Skylar Burris rated it it was amazing Shelves: I read this many years ago as a teenager, before it was as well known as it is today, and then I read it again in college.

Readers often expect imperialism to be dealt with in black and white. Either the author desires to see native ways preserved and consequently views any imperial attempts as immoral and threatening, or he's a Kipling-style "white man's burden" devotee who believes non-European cultures ought to be improved by supervision from their European "superiors. In it, a desire to preserve the native way of life coexists with an urge to admit improvements to it. A tension inevitably arises from the juxtaposition of these two goals.

In Things Fall Apart, this tension courses through every page, and it is part of what makes the book so fascinating. Achebe seems to despise the tendency to simplify complex human life. The events that occur in Things Fall Apart signify the destruction of an entire way of life, an obliteration of the ties that bind a people together. Yet it is not that Achebe unconditionally embraces the culture of the Ibo people. He makes the reader feel for Okonkwo's father, whose failure by Ibo standards is the source of Okonkwo's severity, and for his son, Nwoye, who does not fit into the strictly ordered masculine warrior society.

I appreciated, especially, Achebe's nuanced portrayl of both the positive and negative aspects of missionary activity. When the missionaries come to Nigeria, the church provides a haven for the discontent: I was moved by Achebe's depiction of how Christianity provides a place for the outcast: He felt a relief within as the hymn poured into his parched soul. Although the church gives dignity to the outcast and the misunderstood, the second missionary who comes fails to restrain his converts from injuring the dignity of other Ibos.

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Achebe makes us sympathize with Nwoye's dissatisfaction and acknowledges that Ibo culture was imperfect, but through Okonkwo he also shows us what was lost when the Ibos failed to preserve their culture from the onslaught of the Europeans. The worst thing that can happen to any people is the loss of their dignity and self-respect.

The writer's duty is to help them regain it by showing in human terms what happened to them. He painfully and tragically depicts the tragedy that can result when the only way of life a man has ever known begins to crumble. View all 23 comments. Jun 25, Lisa rated it it was amazing Shelves: My son and I had a long talk about this novel the other day, after he finished reading it for an English class. Over the course of the study unit, we had been talking about Chinua Achebe's fabulous juxtaposition of different layers of society, both within Okonkwo's tribe, and within the colonialist community.

We had been reflecting on aspects of the tribe that we found hard to understand, being foreign and against certain human rights we take for granted, most notably parts of the strict hierarc My son and I had a long talk about this novel the other day, after he finished reading it for an English class. We had been reflecting on aspects of the tribe that we found hard to understand, being foreign and against certain human rights we take for granted, most notably parts of the strict hierarchy and the role of women. And we had been angry together at the inhumane arrogance and violence of the Europeans, who were only in charge based on their technological development level, not on cultural superiority.

We had thought about the roles of men and women, and of individuals in their relation to their families and social environment. We had touched on the hypocrisy of religious missions. I had dwelt on the title and its beautiful context, the poem by Yeats, more relevant now than ever: And "The best lack all conviction We agreed that the novel was excellent, timeless and universally important. And then came the last paragraph If a novel can make a year-old genuinely upset, angry, and frustrated to the point of wanting to slap a fictional character, then the author has managed to convey a message, I'd say.

He got me engaged as well, and I could feel my nausea towards the Commissioner re-emerge instantly when reading his arrogant final thoughts, after the tragic showdown: One could almost write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate. There was so much else to include, and one must be firm in cutting out details. He had already chosen the title of the book, after much thought: My son claimed it was one of the best endings he had ever read - for the sudden change of perspective that disrupted the story and made it stand out in sharp contrast.

Then we continued talking. Which ones could possibly compete? Its last sentence also puts individual suffering into a wider perspective, in this case a time frame: Almost a happy one. Just one of the 3, days of his sentence, from bell to bell. The extra three were for leap years. Second up was All Quiet on the Western Front , in which the death of the narrator is reported in a last paragraph that indicates that the main character's life is of so little importance that newspapers wrote there was "Nothing New on the Western Front".

His so-called heroic death drowned in the meaningless mass dying, his suffering was completely without purpose in the bigger machinations of politics on national level. And yet, he had been so incredibly alive and opinionated and experienced, just the day before Then the last one we could think of mirroring our shared reading experience , was the horrible case of a last sentence showing the victim's complete identification with the tyrant, the falcon loving the falconer, Orwell's closing line in But what a brave new world, that has such people in it!

View all 32 comments. In reality he is an asshole. He is ruthless and unsympathetic to his fellow man. His father was weak and worthless, according to him, so he approached life with an unshakable will to conquer it with his overbearing masculinity. Any wonder then that his son Okonkwo was ashamed of him? Fortunately, among these people a man as judged according to his worth and not according to the worth of his farther. Achebe is clearly suggesting that this is not true for the white man. For all their supposed superiority, they cannot get this simple thing right.

The African tribe here has a better system of promotion based on merit. And here is the crux of the novel. Achebe gives the black man a voice; he gives him culture and civilisation. These men are not represented in an unjust way. He is directly responding to the ignorant trend in Victorian literature that represented the colonised as unintelligible and voiceless: Achebe gives us the reality. This quote says it all: He holds no judgement. His protagonist is completely flawed.

Okonkwo is without mercy; he has earnt his fame and respect, so when an untitled youngster speaks out he is immediately roused to anger. This is his hamartia, his tragic flaw, he must overcome this and treat his fellow tribesmen with a degree of dignity. But, he is a slow learner. And who can blame him? For all his brutality and misogyny, this is till his culture.

Granted, not all the men are as extreme as him. He uses his position to extract violence more than most. His wives are often the focal point for his rage, much to their misfortune. I found this very unusual, but it was also very effective. The point of this novel is to show how uncompromising the white man is.

The protagonist represents this; he has to deal with the crisis. He had a choice: African language is formal, developed and intelligent. Here in Nigeria is the conduit for the Igbo culture.

Things Fall Apart Teacher’s Guide

It is rich in oral tradition. Achebe recognises that to accept a new language is to shun the original culture. Achebe shows that Igbo tradition is dependent on storytelling and language, to accept English would destroy the Igbo traditions. It would alienate the Africans form their culture; thus, resistance, however futile, is the natural and just response. I think what Achebe is trying to portray here is the quietness of the African voice.

It had no say. What matters is that it was taken away or shaped into something else entirely. This was not progress but assimilation. And for Achebe this is the ruination of the voice he was trying to channel. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.

View all 15 comments. Jun 05, J.

Keely rated it it was ok Shelves: The act of writing is strangely powerful, almost magical: For a culture without a written tradition, a libraries are not great structures of stone full of objects--instead, stories are curated within flesh, locked up in a cage of bone. To know the story, you must go to the storyteller. In order for that story to persist through time, it must be retold and rememorized by successive generations.

A book, s The act of writing is strangely powerful, almost magical: A book, scroll, or tablet, on the other hand, can be rediscovered thousands of years later, after all those who were familiar with the story are long dead--and miraculously, the stories within it can be delivered to modern man in the very same words the ancients used. If, in Qumran cave, we had found the dry bones of the scribe who copied the dead sea scrolls instead of the scrolls themselves, we would have no access to any of his knowledge.

Any library can be destroyed, whether the tales are stored in the mind of a bard or on the skins of animals, but unwritten history is much more fragile--after all, speech is nothing more than wind, which cannot be dug up from the earth a century later. All lands have their own histories, but sadly, we only get to hear a scant few in their own words.

We know that Africa had empires as complex and powerful as those of Europe--beyond the well-known examples of Egypt and Carthage, the Romans give us secondary evidence of the great Central African empires from which they got their salt and gold, alongside many subsequent references--but in the end, these amount to little more than myths and legends. Hopefully someday, we will be able to uncover this wealth of knowledge, but until then, we can only imagine all that we have missed: But not all is lost to us.

We still have pieces of the puzzle: The glory of Benin City , the wealth of Mansa Musa --all these await the student of African histories. Plus, there are still storytellers in Africa--the lineages through which their histories have passed are not all dead. Knowing all of this, I thirsted for depth and complexity from Achebe--to get a view into one of the innumerable cultures of Africa. The power of a story from a different culture is in defamiliarization.

Though all cultures share certain universal ideas: So, they are capable of showing us familiar things, but making them feel new, making us look at them in a fresh way. Yet, that's not what I got from this book--indeed, everything in it felt immediately recognizable and familiar, not merely in the sense of 'universal human experience', but in almost every detail of expression and structure. I have read modern stories by fellow American authors which were stranger and produced more culture shock, more defamiliarization than this--but perhaps that was Achebe's intention.

He expressed in interviews just how difficult it was for an African author to publish a novel at all--that no one assumed an African would want to write their own story, and the manuscript was almost lost because the typing agency just didn't take it seriously. Back then, the very notion that Africa might have a history outside of Egypt was controversial--even though it seems simple and obvious to us now that of course every people in every nation has their own history, and the desire for their unique voices to be heard.

So, perhaps it would have been impossible to write a more complex book, that it just wouldn't have been received--Achebe was among the first generation of his people to be college educated, in a branch of a London University opened in Nigeria taught by White, English teachers. More than that, he may have been trying to show that his own culture was just like the culture of his teachers--to stress the similarities instead of the differences. So then, it makes sense that Achebe is not writing a primer of his culture, but is rather reflecting European culture back at itself, from the mouth of an Igbo man a brave and revolutionary act!

After all, he was the consummate Western man of letters, by his education, and everything about his book's form reflects that. It is written, not oral, it is in English, it aligns neatly to the Greek tragic structure and the form of the novel--and even the title is taken from one of the most famous poems in the English language.

Achebe is hardly being coy with his inspirations here--he wants us to know that he is adopting Western forms, he wants us to recognize them, to mark them. He is aware that this is a post-colonial work, a work from a culture that has already been colonized, and is responding to that colonization. This is not a voice from the past--the discovery of Gilgamesh buried in the sands--it is a modern voice speaking from the center of the storm.

The central theme is the onset of colonization, the conflict between the tribe and the European forces just beginning to encroach upon them.

Things Fall Apart (The African Trilogy, #1) by Chinua Achebe

Like his most notable lecture , this book is a deliberate response to writers like Conrad, Kipling, and Haggard. I'm not trying to suggest that it's a problem that Achebe is writing in the Western style, or that he's somehow 'too Western'--because it's any author's prerogative if they want to study and explore Western themes. Indeed, as Said observed , it's vital that writers reach across these boundaries, that we don't just force them into a niche where 'women writers write the female experience' and 'Asian writers write the Asian experience'--because that's just racial determinism: Indeed, one cannot confront colonialism without understanding it, adopting its forms, and turning them against the power structure.

Achebe himself recognized that an oppressed individual has to use every tool to his advantage to fight back--even those tools brought in by the oppressors, such as the English language, which Achebe realized would allow him to communicate with colonized peoples from countries around the world. Authors from all sorts of national and cultural background have taken on the Western style in this way, and proven that they can write just as ably as any Westerner. Unfortunately, that's not the case with this book. As a traditionally Western tale, there just isn't a lot to it.

It is a tale of personal disintegration representing the loss of culture, and of purpose. Salinger--but by trying to make the story more universal, Achebe has watered it down too much, so that it lacks depth, sympathy, and possibility. His existentialism is remarkable for its completeness. There is no character who is wholly sympathetic, nor wholly vile. There is no culture or point of view which is either elevated or vilified. Achebe is extremely fair, presenting the flaws of all men, and of the organizations under which they live, be they Western or African in origin.

Like Heller or Miller, his representation of mankind is almost unfailingly negative. Small moments of beauty, joy, or innocence are always mitigated.

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They exist only in the inflated egos of the characters, or the moralizing ideals of the culture. Unlike Miller, he does not give us the chance to sympathize. There are not those quiet moments of introspection that make Death of a Salesman so personally tragic. Unlike Heller, Achebe does not contrast the overwhelming weight of loss with sardonic and wry humor. This is not the hyperbole of Belinda's lock, nor the mad passion of Hamlet. Achebe's characters are not able to find their own meaning in hopelessness--nor do they even struggle to find it and fail, they cannot even laugh at themselves.

They persist only through naivete and escapism, and since the reader sees through them, we see that this world has only despondence and delusion. The constant reminder of this disappointment makes the book difficult to connect with. Since all the hope we are given is almost immediately false, there is little dynamic possibility. Everything is already lost, we only wait on the characters to realize it. It is difficult to court the reader's sympathy when there is nothing left to be hopeful for. With no counterpoint to despondence--not even a false one--it is hard to create narrative depth, to reveal, or to surprise.

Trying to write a climax through such a pervasive depression is like trying to raise a mountain in a valley. No matter how hard they try, there is no visible path to success. Nothing is certain, and the odds against are often overwhelming. Achebe felt this doubly, as an author and a colonized citizen.

He succeeds in presenting hopelessness, sometimes reaching Sysiphean Absurdism, but with too few grains to weigh in the scale against it, his tale presents only a part of the human experience. Though we may know that others suffer, this is not the same as comprehending their suffering.

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The mother who says 'eat your peas, kids are starving in Africa' succeeds more through misdirection than by revealing the inequalities of politics and the human state. Achebe presents suffering to us, but it is not sympathetic; we see it, but are not invited to feel it.

His world loses depth and dimension, becomes scattered, and while this does show us the way that things may fall apart, particularly all things human, this work is more an exercise in nihilism than a representation of the human experience. So, it ends up being one of those books that it more notable for its place in the canon than its quality.

It was certainly a brave and revolutionary act for Achebe to write it, and to persist with it, but the book itself is less impressive than the gesture that produced it. For me, it becomes prototypical of a whole movement of books by people of non-Western descent who get praised and published precisely because they parrot back Western values at us and avoid confronting us with actual cultural differences, while at the same time using a thin patina of 'foreignness' to feel suitably exotic, so that the average Western reader can feel more worldly for having read them.

It's flat works like The Kite Runner or House Made of Dawn which are just exotic enough to titillate without actually requiring that the reader learn anything about the culture in order to appreciate it--because of course every guilt-ridden Liberal Westerner wants to read about other cultures, but as Stewart Lee put it: Of course, I'm not suggesting that Achebe is anywhere near that--just that it makes obvious the problem with judging a book by its historical place rather than the actual words on the page.

Indeed, it's downright insulting to the author and the culture. It's the same response people would have to hearing that a dog wrote a book: I've got to read that! To treat a person the same way because they are from another culture is pure condescension. Just because someone is born into a culture, that does not make them representative of that culture--authenticity is not an in-born trait, which is the problem of the illusion of the 'pure voice', because there is no pure cultural voice, and to imagine there is is to reduce that culture to a stereotype.

A woman can be a misogynist, an African American can hate his own people. To suggest that somehow, a person's views and perspective are in-born and unchangeable is simply racism--and it doesn't matter if the trait you are assigning to that race is positive or negative, it's still a limitation you're putting on that person. Non-Westerners are just as capable of creating great works of art as Westerners--but they are also just as capable of writing cliche tripe.

Like any other human being, they run the gamut from brilliant to dull, from bigoted to open-minded, from staid to imaginative. As such, there's no reason to grade non-Western authors on some kind of sliding scale, to expect less from them, or to be any less disappointed when their works fall short. Of course, we shouldn't judge their work by Western standards, either--to blame a Japanese fairytale for not being Hamlet--unless like Achebe they are writing in a recognizable Western style and deliberately drawing that comparison.

While there's certainly something to be said for 'getting your foot in the door', that isn't a defense of the book itself--of its plot, characters, or themes. It's also too much to place Africa on Achebe's shoulders--to pretend as if there aren't thousands of unique cultures, histories, and traditions there--and yet that is what we do. We make Achebe into a point of entry to a whole continent, which is a massive burden to place on anyone. Much better to look at the book itself--its words and images--than to try to make it into something that it is not.

A book that lasts can't just be its place and time, it needs to have a deeper vein that successive generations can return to over and over, and I didn't find that here. It works only because it is situated in that certain way, transgressive but not too transgressive to alienate its audience--not quite able to escape being a product of its time, but still managing to point the way to the future. But Conrad is not merely revolutionary by his stance, he has also written a fascinating and fraught book, complex and many-layered, which succeeds despite its shortfalls.

Things Fall Apart , in contrast, is a book that only works because of its positioning, and has little further depth to recommend it. I cannot say that the book was not effective, in its place and time--because it certainly was--or that it hasn't been inspirational, but in the end, Achebe's revolutionary gesture far outshines the meager story beneath it. View all 59 comments.

Oct 05, Will Byrnes rated it really liked it. In this classic tale Okonkwo is a strong man in his village, and in his region of nine villages. At age 18 he beat the reigning wrestling champion and has been an industrious worker all his life, a reaction to his lazy, drunkard father. He lives his life within the cultural confines of his limited world, following the laws that govern his society, accepting the religious faith of his surroundings, acting on both, even when those actions would seem, to us in the modern west, an abomination. While In this classic tale Okonkwo is a strong man in his village, and in his region of nine villages.

In this case, his home town is revolutionized when white missionaries set up a base and bring along with them the firepower of western weapons. Unable to cope, unable to channel his justifiable rage into constructive actions, he is led inexorably to his doom. Chinua Achebe - from the Salon article noted below What is this book about? It is a simple tale. Is this a warning to us of our own inability to see beyond the confines of our culture? How will we cope with change when it comes, in whatever form?

I found it difficult keeping track of the characters. This is a case in which a diagram of a family tree would probably come in handy. Yet, ultimately, this is not so important. And the impact of the West arriving in an African society. This book is considered a classic,and for good reason. In fact you could do worse than skipping the above review entirely and checking out Green's vid. And there is a second episode of his vid on the book as well. In , Salon republished a wonderful essay, Chinua Achebe: The man who rediscovered Africa , on news of his passing.

View all 14 comments. Y'know when you read a novel that is just so stark and bare and depraved that you know it's going to stay with you for a very long time? Yep, it's happened guys. This novel ruined me. Ugh it's so great and so horrible. It's what Yeats would describe as a " terrible beauty ". Read it, let it wreck you, and bathe in its importance. View all 6 comments. Apr 30, M. Rudolph rated it really liked it. Love it or hate it, Achebe's tale of a flawed tribal patriarch is a powerful and important contribution to twentieth century literature.

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