Things Fall Apart Character Analysis

Upon an initial reading of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, it is easy to blame the demise of Okonkwo’s life and of the Umofia community on the imperialistic invasions of the white men. After all, Okonkwo seemed to be enjoying relative peace and happiness before then. He did have a few mishaps; one of them resulted in him being exiled for eight years. Nonetheless, he returned to his home town with high spirits and with prospects of increased success. However, everything has changed. The white men have brought with them a new religion and a new government. Okonkwo’s family falls apart. The men in his village lose their courage and valor; they do not offer any resistance to the white men. Consequently, Okonkwo kills

Since Okonkwo stood out more than all the other men he was seen as Umuofia's most powerful man. Although Okonkwo is the most powerful man in Umuofia he also has weaknesses. One of those weaknesses is his father, he doesn’t wanna be a weak man and careless like his father. As the white missionaries moved in into their home land, the Igbo people who are unsure of how to react to these traditions either switched to their ways or stayed faithful to their faith. Many people became persuaded of the new religions authorities, however Okonkwo who is an warrior at heart refuses to accept the changes that were taking place in his community.

Upon his return, Okonkwo wants people to see him as a leader again with many titles. However, that wasn’t the same as before. He was even shocked that none of his people wanted to go to war after the Europeans have taken over. Okonkwo realize that his old village and the people there have converted and changed, including his son, Nwoye. He even proposed to go to war with the European men and the missionaries. “‘The waiting backcloth jumped into tumultuous life and the meeting was stopped. 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. They had broken into tumult instead of action. He discerned fright in that tumult. He heard voices asking: ‘Why did he do it?”’(205). This illustrates the enormous change in their society. At the start of the novel, everyone is willing to fight one another and to show that they are better and well respected than others. In this situation, we can see that everyone is following stringent rules set up by the Europeans. This change in religion will bring an end to the Igbo

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

In Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe employs imagery, symbolism, and themes to reveal the story of Okonkwo. Throughout the novel he weaves in these things to really tell us the tale.

His tragic downfall truly begins when his is sent away because of an accidental murder of a boy. Okonkwo and his family are exiled from the tribe for seven years and Okonkwo is stripped of the fruits of his hard work. While he is away the white missionaries move into the village. They preach against the culture and its violent ways, causing Okonkwo to become saturated with rage. Seven years later, Okonkwo is able to return. He plans to reestablish himself and his position with the help of his family. However, Umofia is not as it once was. The white men have moved in and dismantled the tribe with their laws and government. Okonkwo wishes to fight, but the clan does not agree with his suggestion. After realizing the fate of the village, Okonkwo chooses to take his life. He would rather die than watch everything he had worked for fall apart because of weak people. His tragic flaw, a fear of weakness, is so strong it destroyed him.

The focus of the individual is prominent in Things Fall Apart, a tale of an almost anti-social being in a world dominated by change.  Achebe's main character, Okonkwo, is the window to the dramatization of social, economic, and political change of the nation known as Nigeria.  The focus of the narrative is the struggle of a strong and well respected individual to maintain his own life course, and to differentiate this outcome from the end result of his lethargic father's life.  The story embodies the ideal of embracing the individual's goals and aspirations to yield an outcome

Perhaps it becomes clearer how much of an accomplishment it is to stay oneself in unforgiving circumstances when it is shown how it can feel like it is best to just give up. At the beginning of Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo is a stern man who had to support himself from a very young age, and through his tireless work, rises up the ranks to become one of the greatest man in the Igbo village of Umuofia. Okonkwo, because of the lazy and carefree nature of his father, Unoka, has very rigid, harsh beliefs about strength and responsibility. During and after his seven-year exile from Umuofia brought on by an accidental killing, he notices a slow change coming about with the arrival of Christian missionaries from Britain, looking for converts. Eventually, the church established there becomes large enough to threaten the Umuofian religion and disrupt the villagers’ lives. Okonkwo’s identity is closely tied to his life and status in Umuofia, and the ideals

One key point in this novel was when Nwoye converted to the missionaries. Okonkwo was devastated and it was clearly shown by his actions. “Why, he cried in his heart, should he, Okonkwo, of all people, be cursed with such a son. He saw clearly in it the finger of his personal god or chi. For how else could he explain his great misfortune and exile and now his despicable son’s behavior? Now that he had time to think of it, his son’s crime stood out in its stark enormity. To abandon the gods of one’s father and go about with a lot of effeminate men clucking like old hens was the very depth of abomination. Suppose when he died all his male children decided to follow Nwoye’s steps and abandon their ancestors? Okonkwo felt a cold shudder run through him at the terrible prospect, like the prospect of annihilation.” Okonkwo and his son Nwoye also symbolize tradition and change, respectively. Okonkwo's character represents tradition, since he holds conventional ideas of rank, reputation, and masculinity in high esteem. As the book progresses, however, Okonkwo begins to fall out of favor with the clans, and his descent signals the crumbling of traditional Umuofia society. His adherence to tradition also drives him to kill his own surrogate son, Ikemefuna, driving away Nwoye in the process. Seeing his own son switch and disobey the tradition, hurt Okonkwo. It stripped a piece away from him

Tragic heroes are the literary characters who suffer the most in a story, novel or a play. “Tragic heroes are so much the highest points in their human landscape that they seem the inevitable conductors of the power about them, great trees more likely to be struck by lightning than a clump of grass. Conductors may, of course, be instruments as well as victims of the divisive lightning.” said the famous critic Northrop Frye. These literary characters are the essential piece of a tragedy.

The missionaries conflict with everything Okonkwo believes or values. The missionaries are so outlandish to Okonkwo that his first reaction is just to laugh at them. This is shown on page 147, paragraph 4, “ At the end of it Okonkwo was fully convinced that the man was mad. He shrugged his shoulders and went away.” Okonkwo later begins to understand the threat the missionaries pose to his society and passionately speaks for forcing the missionaries out of Umuofia. However when his people will not listen to him, he feels like he is forced to take matters into his own hands. This is shown on page 204, paragraph 7,” Okonkwo’s machete descended twice and the man’s head lay beside his uniformed body”. The Ibo people do not join in on the violence as Okonkwo had hoped, which contradicted with Okonkwo belief that the Ibo were warrior people. This final loss of Okonkwo’s core beliefs is what shatters Okonkwo’s final sense of identity as a man. As Okonkwo is no longer any of the things he has come to identify himself as, and Okonkwo blames the missionaries for this, his final response to the missionaries is to take his own life. Okonkwo's death is shown on page 207, paragraph 3 “ Then they came to the tree from which Okonkwo’s body was dangling, and they stopped dead.” When Okonkwo identity was ripped from him he no longer saw a point in living and his fight with the

Chinua Achebe unfolds a variety of interesting connections between characters in the Novel Things Fall Apart. Relationships with parents, children and inner self are faced differently, however the attitude that Okonkwo gave them determined what kind of outcome he generated from these relations. Okonkwo looks at everything through his violent and manly perspective and is afraid to show his real feelings because he thinks that he may be thought out as weak and feminine this paranoid attitude lead him to self-destruction.

The Umuofian people were attending a funeral for the death of the great warrior, Ezeudu. All the people were being wild and loud saluting him by firing their guns when Okonkwo’s gun had exploded and it killed a young boy. Consequently, Okonkwo and his family had to leave Umuofia for 7 years because the act of killing a clansman is against the earth goddess. So Okonkwo and his family had gone to Mbanta in which was his motherland and his mother’s kinsmen had taken care of them. With that tragic event happening, he knew that he had lost everything he has ever achieved. He thought that when he returned back to his village of Umuofia he will regain his power in his society and everything will go back to normal. However, while Okonkwo was gone living in his motherland, the white men were changing the ways of life and customs for the Umuofian people. He was in belief that after he returned he could change everything back around and achieve the highest title there was. When he returned back to Umuofia, he found out that his village was becoming to be a civilization like the white men had and nobody was against it as much as Okonkwo was. He came to realization that his clan and their beliefs were falling apart and nobody was caring to stand up and do something. Okonkwo told Mr. Smith that he will do no harm and continue to live here but

The Clash Between Okonkwo and his new culture “ When one looks back over human existence, however, it is very evident that all culture has developed through an initial resistance against adaption to the reality in which man finds himself.” Beatrice Hinkle. Okonkwo’s sense of identity was challenged with the introduction of the western ideas into the Ibo culture. Okonkwo started out in the novel as a very powerful man, but then the cultural collision of the British colonists and Ibo people affected Okonkwo to the point of self-destruction. The reasons for Okonkwo’s change in their sense of identity included the white men coming to live among the Umuofians.

Okonkwo feels that the only way to drive out the missionaries is to take a war like lead in the situation. He begins to show signs of aggression and rebellion when Enoch, a converted Ibo, interrupts the annual worship ceremony of the earth goddess. By doing so, Enoch had killed an ancestral spirit, and Umuofia 's very foundation is thrown into chaos.