preview

Ghost By Adichie

Good Essays

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “Ghosts” is a short story centered on a dialogue between aging professor James Nwoye and Ikenna Okoro, an acquaintance whom he had thought long dead. Through their conversation, we gain perspective on Nwoye’s history (specifically, during a civil war), and though no action takes place in the present, we experience the events through the lens of his memories. “Ghosts” is unusual in that this primary sequence of events does not take place in the story’s present, which involves characters that do not appear or speak in the story, driving the plot forward through Nwoye’s memories and creating a timeless, surreal mood that illustrates the mindset of the narrator. In many aspects, “Ghosts” appears to follow a typical short …show more content…

I trust she is well in America?’ He always asks about our daughter. He often drove my wife and me to visit her at the College of Medicine in Enugu. I remember that when Ebere died, he came with his relatives for mgbalu and gave a touching, if rather long, speech about how well Ebere had treated him when he was our driver, how she gave him our daughter’s old clothes for his children” (Adichie …show more content…

They also simulate the structure of memory. The point of view and tone resemble hearing a firsthand story told aloud, and Adichie’s flashbacks and tangents add to this effect. As such, there is some danger of an unreliable narrator; though Adichie can speak volumes with few words, they can be misleading and tend to rely on allowing the reader to fill in illustrative preconceptions, the problem with which, she says in a TED talk, “is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete” (Adichie 13:05). We are limited by Nwoye’s perspective, which may be deteriorating as he blurs the lines between memory and reality. Whether in the present or in memory, Ebere has a profound effect on the plot. The story of her life with her husband, as told by Nwoye, is one of the most prominent recurring storylines, and although it is told in parallel to the conversation with Ikenna that is the most “real” in terms of events, it is arguably the dominant

Get Access