Things fall apart - Content Flashcards
How does Ikemefuna become Okonkwo’s adopted son?
Ikemefuna becomes Okonkwo’s adopted son through a dispute between the village of Umuofia and a neighboring village, Mbaino. After a woman from Umuofia is murdered in the Mbaino market, Okonkwo travels to Mbaino and demands that the village surrender a virgin and a young man in order to avoid war with Umuofia. Mbaino complies, and upon return to Umuofia, Okonkwo turns the young man, Ikemefuna, over to his first wife for safekeeping.
Why is Ezinma so special to Okonkwo?
Ezinma is the only child of Okonkwo’s second wife, Ekwefi, and she is also Okonkwo’s favorite daughter. Okonkwo feels drawn to Ezinma for her precocious intelligence and her strong will. More than any of Okonkwo’s other children, Ezinma possesses all of the personality traits required to grow into a distinguished member of society. In other words, she is the most masculine of Okonkwo’s children, and Okonkwo frequently laments that she was not born a boy.
Why does Nwoye convert to Christianity?
Nwoye converts to Christianity largely to reject the excessive standard of masculinity his father wants him up to uphold. Nwoye is not at all like his father, and Okonkwo constantly punishes him for being different. Stifled by his father’s expectations, Nwoye runs away and joins the European church. Nwoye’s conversion also provides him an opportunity to learn reading and writing, which, along with the poetry of the Bible, feeds his love of storytelling.
What causes Okonkwo’s exile from Umuofia?
Okonkwo’s gun goes off unexpectedly during Ogbuefi Ezeudu’s funeral, accidentally killing the dead man’s son. Killing a clansman, even unintentionally, constitutes a crime against the earth goddess. To compensate for the crime and protect the rest of the villagers from the earth goddess’s wrath, Ezeudu’s descendants burn Okonkwo’s compound, slaughter his livestock, and banish him from the village for a period of seven years.
Why does Okonkwo hang himself?
After Okonkwo and others return from a period of imprisonment by the Europeans, members of the nine villages gather to discuss a course of action. Four European messengers appear and try to stop the meeting, and Okonkwo immediately kills one of them. But instead of applauding the murder, as he expects they will, Okonkwo’s clansmen grow furious. Okonkwo sees his clansmen’s reaction as a sign that no one will stand with him in defense of the nine villages. Rather than face the ultimate emasculation of succumbing to the white men, Okonkwo returns to his compound and hangs himself.
Motif: Chi
The concept of chi is discussed at various points throughout the novel and is important to our understanding of Okonkwo as a tragic hero. The chi is an individual’s personal god, whose merit is determined by the individual’s good fortune or lack thereof. Along the lines of this interpretation, one can explain Okonkwo’s tragic fate as the result of a problematic chi—a thought that occurs to Okonkwo at several points in the novel. For the clan believes, as the narrator tells us in Chapter 14, a “man could not rise beyond the destiny of his chi.” But there is another understanding of chi that conflicts with this definition. In Chapter 4, the narrator relates, according to an Igbo proverb, that “when a man says yes his chi says yes also.” According to this understanding, individuals will their own destinies. Thus, depending upon our interpretation of chi, Okonkwo seems either more or less responsible for his own tragic death. Okonkwo himself shifts between these poles: when things are going well for him, he perceives himself as master and maker of his own destiny; when things go badly, however, he automatically disavows responsibility and asks why he should be so ill-fated.
Motif: Animal Imagery
In their descriptions, categorizations, and explanations of human behavior and wisdom, the Igbo often use animal anecdotes to naturalize their rituals and beliefs. The presence of animals in their folklore reflects the environment in which they live—not yet “modernized” by European influence. Though the colonizers, for the most part, view the Igbo’s understanding of the world as rudimentary, the Igbo perceive these animal stories, such as the account of how the tortoise’s shell came to be bumpy, as logical explanations of natural phenomena. Another important animal image is the figure of the sacred python. Enoch’s alleged killing and eating of the python symbolizes the transition to a new form of spirituality and a new religious order. Enoch’s disrespect of the python clashes with the Igbo’s reverence for it, epitomizing the incompatibility of colonialist and indigenous values.
Symbol: Locusts
Achebe depicts the locusts that descend upon the village in highly allegorical terms that prefigure the arrival of the white settlers, who will feast on and exploit the resources of the Igbo. The fact that the Igbo eat these locusts highlights how innocuous they take them to be. Similarly, those who convert to Christianity fail to realize the damage that the culture of the colonizer does to the culture of the colonized.
The language that Achebe uses to describe the locusts indicates their symbolic status. The repetition of words like “settled” and “every” emphasizes the suddenly ubiquitous presence of these insects and hints at the way in which the arrival of the white settlers takes the Igbo off guard. Furthermore, the locusts are so heavy they break the tree branches, which symbolizes the fracturing of Igbo traditions and culture under the onslaught of colonialism and white settlement. Perhaps the most explicit clue that the locusts symbolize the colonists is Obierika’s comment in Chapter 15: “the Oracle . . . said that other white men were on their way. They were locusts. . . .”
Symbol: Fire
Okonkwo is associated with burning, fire, and flame throughout the novel, alluding to his intense and dangerous anger—the only emotion that he allows himself to display. Yet the problem with fire, as Okonkwo acknowledges in Chapters 17 and 24, is that it destroys everything it consumes. Okonkwo is both physically destructive—he kills Ikemefuna and Ogbuefi Ezeudu’s son—and emotionally destructive—he suppresses his fondness for Ikemefuna and Ezinma in favor of a colder, more masculine aura. Just as fire feeds on itself until all that is left is a pile of ash, Okonkwo eventually succumbs to his intense rage, allowing it to rule his actions until it destroys him.
Foreshadowing
Foreshadowing in Things Fall Apart begins with the novel’s title, which indicates that the story to come does not end well. Achebe amplifies this sense of impending doom by prefacing Part One with an epigraph containing the quote from W. B. Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming” from which the novel gets its name. Yeats’s poem presents a deeply ominous vision of some mysterious future event, which its speaker envisions arising from the chaos and anarchy that characterizes the present moment. It is not at all clear, however, whether this future event bodes well or ill: “[W]hat rough beast,” the speaker asks, “Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” Achebe’s use of Yeats is significant. Yeats wrote his poem at the start of the Irish War of Independence, when Ireland sought its freedom from British colonialism. While Yeats envisions an obscure future beyond the horror of colonialism, Achebe uses Yeats to signal not the end but the beginning of colonialism in Nigeria.
Foreshadowing: Arrival of the British
n addition to the title and the epigraph from Yeats, Achebe uses other strategies to foreshadow the arrival of the British. Take, for instance, the coming of the locusts. The narrator explains how the first swarm of locusts that came was small: “They were the harbingers sent to survey the land” before the rest descended. The locusts prefigure the missionaries, who in turn prefigure the eventual coming of colonial governance. The narrator makes this connection explicit later in the novel, when Obierika informs Okonkwo of the oracle’s prophecy following the first appearance of a white man in the nine villages: “It said that other white men were on their way. They were locusts, it said, and that first man was their harbinger sent to explore the terrain.” The narrator also uses proverbs to accomplish a similar effect. For instance, after the accident that results in Okonkwo’s exile, the narrator makes an ominous nod to proverbial wisdom: “As the elders said, if one finger brought oil it soiled the others.” This sentence appears at the very end of Part One and suggests the challenges that will arise throughout Parts Two and Three.
Foreshadowing : Nwoye’s Conversion
Although Nwoye’s conversion to Christianity comes as a surprise to Okonkwo, the narrator foreshadows this event by frequently underlining Nwoye’s frustration both with his father’s harsh expectations and with certain Igbo cultural practices he finds morally questionable. One clear instance of foreshadowing comes in Nwoye’s love for the tales his mother tells. Okonkwo dismisses these as “women’s” stories and forces Nwoye to listen to “masculine stories of violence and bloodshed” instead. When Nwoye later hears “the poetry of the new religion,” it captivates him like his mother’s stories and lays the groundwork for his conversion. In addition to its poetry, the Christian tradition also illuminates aspects of Igbo culture that trouble Nwoye. For example, “The hymn about brothers who sat in darkness and in fear seemed to answer a vague and persistent question . . . of the twins crying in the bush and the question of Ikemefuna who was killed.” These questions first haunted Nwoye many years earlier, which was the first time “something [gave] away inside of him,” foreshadowing his eventual decision to abandon Igbo customs.
Foreshadowing:Okonkwo’s Suicide
Just as clues predict Nwoye’s conversion, clues also predict Okonkwo’s suicide. The first clue comes early in the novel, when a farmer succumbs to despair following a particularly devastating yam harvest: “One man tied his cloth to a tree branch and hanged himself,” just like Okonkwo will do at the novel’s conclusion. A second clue comes much later, when Okonkwo is exiled in Mbanta and Obierika comes to deliver the profits from his friend’s yam harvest. In a morbid, joking exchange, Okonkwo expresses that he does not know how to thank Obierika. When Okonkwo indicates that it would not even be enough to kill one of his sons in gratitude, Obierika suggests an alternative: “Then kill yourself.” Although meant as a joke, the reader recalls this grim suggestion ten pages later when Obierika returns to Mbanta to inform Okonkwo of Nwoye’s conversion to Christianity. Okonkwo has a premonition of doom: “[He] felt a cold shudder run through him at the terrible prospect, like the prospect of annihilation.” The sense of doom Okonkwo feels here speaks at once to the annihilation of the Igbo world and to his own future suicide.
