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Things Fall Apart Folktales

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In many cultures, folklore and myths are told to children as a way to pass down cultural values and wisdom to future generations. Folktales are typically told verbally and in an easy to comprehend form, allowing children to understand and learn from the underlying morals within the stories. In Things Fall Apart, Achebe uses folktales as a stylistic mechanism to portray the division between genders in the Igbo’s culture, and to mirror and foreshadow the novel’s events in simplistic manner.
In Things Fall Apart, folktales are seemingly used to symbolize femininity. Women in the Igbo culture share folktales to their children as a way to teach them cultural values and to spread wisdom down through the generations. Okonkwo fears for the future of his compound after seeing his son’s, laziness. He notices Nwoye acting in a non-masculine, or in Okonkwo’s mind a feminine, manner. Okonkwo’s compulsive urge to uphold his manly appearance prompts him to view all folktales as “silly”, and refer to them as “women’s stories” (Achebe 75). …show more content…

Okonkwo, pleased by his sons development, invites Ikemefuna and Nwoye to sit with him, and tells them “masculine stories of violence and bloodshed” (Achebe 53). Nwoye has always loved and prefered the childish folktales told by his mother over his father’s violent war stories, but knows that in the Igbo’s culture, folktales “were for foolish women and children , and [that] his father [wants] him to be a man” (Achebe 54). Subsequently, Nwoye finds himself feigning his distaste for the charming folktales, and “[feigning] annoyance and [grumbling] aloud about women and their troubles”, in order to please his father (Achebe

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