Okonkwo In Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart

In Things Fall Apart Okonkwo is defeated by forces that are beyond his control because when he goes back to his village he sees that it has changed and is more religious and ends up committing suicide. “Then they came to the tree from which Okonkwos body was dangling and they stopped dead.” The evidence supports the claim because when the commissioners came to Okonkwos compound he was not there. The commissioners were led to a bush were led to a tree on which okonkwos body was dangling. Okonkwo is defeated by forces that are beyond his control because when the commissioner found the tree Okonkwo was hanging off the tree.

We take a look at his personality and see that he had a warrior complex and machismo. For example in the novel on page 158 paragraph six it says “let us not reason like cowards.” His warrior complex turns everything he does like a battle plan. He wants there to be a fight or else they are not doing it right. Okonkwo’s machismo makes everyone else who is not like him not a man. In the book we see this on page 26 paragraph two “this meeting is for men.” He did not want to listen to the man because he was not well known like him and he did not have as many titles as okonkwo did. Both of these traits aided in the way he responded to the new culture.

This novel is the definitive tragic model about the dissolution of the African Ibo culture by Nigerian author, Chinua Achebe. Okonkwo, a great and heroic leader, is doomed by his inflexibility and hubris. He is driven by fear of failure.

Okonkwo had a lot of flaws. He was stuck on having a good reputation and raising the best family he could. He feared for his children to become like his father and his wives to become lazy. He got mad frequently and took it out on his family if they did anything wrong. But one of his flaws were involved with the killing of his adopted son Ikemefuna. A group of elders had gone with Okonkwo and Ikemefuna to a forest, where one of them swung their machete at the poor boy and destroyed. Ikemefuna ran to Okonkwo for help, but “dazed with fear, Okonkwo drew his machete and cut him down” (61). The man was afraid of being thought of as weak. Then again, he had always had a tough image around others. Of course, accidents happened quite a lot for Okonkwo because he accidentally killed a higher up in the village during Ezeudu’s funeral and “he could not return to the clan after seven years” (124). He had to start all over with his family and return to his motherland. Life was never fun for Okonkwo. Hard work and strict punishment was basically what he was known for. So when Okonkwo and men from Umuofia went to visit the District Commissioner, they were taken as prisoners and whipped along with being shaven until a certain price was paid. Once they were released and they went home, people in the village were accepting until “nobody else spoke but they noticed the long stripes on Okonkwo’s

Okonkwo life is “dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness” (Achebe 13). When Okonkwo was a boy, his playmates teased him calling, saying that his father was agbala. Okonkwo’s father, Unoka, was lazy. He did not work on his farm; he died in great debt. He did not acquire a single title. He did not have a barn to pass down to his son. Unoka is a type of man who is scorned in Umofia. He is seen as weak and effeminate. As Okonkwo grows older, he is determined not become a failure like his father. His father was weak; he will be strong. His father was lazy; he will be hard-working. Okonkwo earned his fame by defeating the reigning wrestling champion. Okonkwo diligently plants yam, building a successful farm. He builds himself an obi, has three wives and many children. His fame “rested on solid personal achievements” (Achebe 3). Okonkwo will not let one womanly trait sully his reputation. Therefore, he “hate[d] everything that his father Unoka had loved” (Achebe 13). One of these was gentleness. Okonkwo refuses to show any signs of emotion, except his temper. He

The character of Okonkwo in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart was driven by fear, a fear of change and losing his self-worth. He needed the village of Umuofia, his home, to remain untouched by time and progress because its system and structure were the measures by which he assigned worth and meaning in his own life. Okonkwo required this external order because of his childhood and a strained relationship with his father, which was also the root of his fears and subsequent drive for success. When the structure of Umuofia changed, as happens in society, Okonkwo was unable to adapt his methods of self-evaluation and ways of functioning in the world; the life he was determined to live could not survive a new environment and collapsed around

However,But his culture is changing, the values of manliness are being replaced by the values of the new religion, Cchristianity: “Okonkwo was deeply grieved. And it was not just personal grief. He mourned for the clan, which he saw breaking up and falling apart, and he mourned for the warlike men of Umuofia, who has unaccountably become soft like women”(183). The people of his village are changing, they are no longer the “warlike men” that they once were. He sees how his clan is changing and when he realizes that he can not stop the change, he takes his own life. He cannot not and will not live in a world so different than the one he used to. In the end Okonkwo's manliness is the reason he dies, making it a very fatal flaw

Okonkwo’s fear of unmanliness is kindled by his father, who was a lazy, unaccomplished man. Okonkwo strives to have a high status from a young age and eventually achieves it. He has a large family, many yams and is well known throughout the village for his valor. He

Okonkwo's fear of being perceived as weak tragically leads to him to be unnecessarily violent and excessively prideful. These two fatal flaws lead to Okonkwo’s own emotional isolation, and his inevitable downfall. Driven by the fear of being seen as weak and emasculated, Okonkwo exhibits hyper masculinity and rage. Although this behavior initially leads to success in the patriarchal society of Umofia, rage is his greatest bane: it masks his compassion and pusillanimity. Onkonkwo’s obsession to never appear feminine is driven to the extreme. He denies affection even to his own family, “never show[ing] any emotion openly, unless it be the emotion of anger. To [Okonkwo] show[ing] affection was a sign of weakness; the only thing worth demonstrating was strength.” (pg. 28). Okonkwo whose “whole life [is] dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness.” (pg. 13) suppress his compassion in order to appear important and manly. Ironically this creates a stark juxtaposition between his own fear and his position as an alpha male. Rather than being masculine and courageous, Okonkwo just creates tension within his family and within himself. The pinnacle of this extreme hypermasculinity is when Okonkwo ignores the wisdom of the elder Ezeudu, and violently kills his “son” Ikamafuna: “As the man who had cleared his throat drew up and raised his machete, Okonkwo looked away. He had heard Ikamafuna cry “My father, they have killed me!”

Okonkwo, as presented by Chinua Achebe in the novel Things Fall Apart, wished to be revered by all as a man of great wealth, power and control--the antithesis of his father. Okonkwo was driven by the need to exhibit utmost control over himself and others; he was an obsessive and insecure man.

The description given early in the novel clearly establishes his character as being a strong and wealthy man who is well respected among the rest of the tribe due to his superior fighting abilities and his influential personality. Having achieved such elite status within the Umuofia clan, Okonkwo appears to be old-fashioned as it is seen in his approach in raising his family and tribal people. However, Okonkwo’s character changes incrementally with the emergence of a boy, Ikemefuna, from a neighboring village, who was brought to him because of his brutal attack against his wife Ojiugo during the ‘week of peace’. Amongst the Umuofia clan, the ‘week of peace’ is a tribal ritual whose conditions are not to complete any evil sins in a certain week span. After having accepted Ikemefuna into the family, Okonkwo experiences a shift in his mental state. Shortly hereafter, he questions this change, which demonstrates his lack of willingness to change which is clearly demonstrated in the book in several different ways like in chapter Eight, Okonkwo proclaims to himself, “When did you become a shivering old woman, you, who are known in all nine villages for your valour in war” (Achebe 56). This represents that his character has become a weaker, less influential individual amongst the nine tribes where he is well known. Symbolically, this depicts a fragile reputation in Okonkwo’s status within the community to which he belongs.

One of the most commonly asked questions about the novel Things Fall Apart is: why did Achebe choose a tragic hero, Okonkwo, as the main character in the story. According to Nnoromele, “A hero, in the Igbo cultural belief system, is one with great courage and strength to work against destabilizing forces of his community, someone who affects, in a special way, the destinies of others by pursuing his own. He is a man noted for special achievements. His life is defined by ambivalence, because his actions must stand in sharp contrast to ordinary behavior”(Nnoromele). In my opinion, he chose this type of hero to show the correlation between Okonkwo’s rise and fall in the Igbo society to the rise and fall of the Igbo culture itself. Many

For all of his desire to be strong, Okonkwo is caught up by the constant fear of being perceived as weak. He is afraid of failure and afraid of being considered weak. This fear drives him to do whatever he can to not become a failure like his father which ironically contributes to his death. While Okonkwo was a strong and important figure in his tribe, he had to keep his reputation that way by making some hard decisions. One of them was when he had to kill Ikemefuna, a young boy from the neighboring tribe. Okonkwo started accepting the decision to kill Ikemefuna because he started to call Okonkwo father. He had to keep his own valor intact and kill the boy to prevent himself from showing any weakness, but deep down, Okonkwo was really upset because of what he did which was ironic, “’When did you become a shivering old woman,' Okonkwo asked himself, 'you, who are known in all the nine villages for your valor in war? How can a man who has killed five men in battle fall to pieces because he has added a boy to their number? Okonkwo, you have become a woman indeed.'" (Achebe 65). He continued to roll downhill when the white man comes to try and convert Okonkwo’s tribe. Okonkwo responds by killing one of the messengers that were sent. This cause Okonkwo's own tribe to question his actions. “"Okonkwo stood looking at the dead man. He knew that Umuofia would not go to war. He knew because they had let the other messengers escape.

Okonkwo thinks that his mother’s clan is too womanly compare to his father’s clan of Umuofia, however even when he returns to his father’s clan after the completion of his exile he is also very much out of place there also. This is due to his obsessive masculinity and also because he just cannot adapt to the changing of times. Okonkwo “had lost his place among the masked spirits in the village” in addition to that “he had lost the chance to lead his warlike clan against the new religion” consequently he lost any voice he ever had and was a “stranger” in his land seeming as nobody appeared to have taken any special notice of the “warriors” return. He speaks with his friend Obierika about the strangeness of his home land saying,

Everyone has goals in life ,and strives to complete these goals throughout the course of their lives. Although it may be challenging to accomplish these goals, a person needs to know when to stop pushing themselves. In the novel, Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe, a stubborn man who lives in an African village strives to be the alpha male among everyone he knows. Okonkwo, once a great man, fell because his father's influence, his personality and the invading British.