Okonkwo's Greatest Battle: Things Fall Apart

Throughout Chinua Achebe’s novel, Things Fall Apart, it is made very apparent how much the main character, Okonkwo, values manliness. Despite the fact that Okonkwo lived quite a few centuries ago, his story still shares some similarities with the way men today are pressured to be masculine. Okonkwo’s desire to be masculine affects him by causing him to be violent towards his family, view women as lesser than him, and produce a view that men shouldn’t have emotions. In the end, this desire causes his downfall, eventually causing him to take his own life.

The connection that Okonkwo has with masculinity is that he shows to others who is in control. He ends up beating up one of his wives because of the assumption

In the book Things Fall Apart, there are many things that fall apart. The major aspect that fell apart is the clan. There are many major foreshadowing events that showed the decline of the clan, including the locusts, the accidental death of a boy by Okonkwo forcing the exile of his family, and the arrival of the white missionaries. When the missionaries arrive, they start to oppress their religion onto the people of the clan. They are seemed to be crazy, and almost disrespectful of the clan’s customs on religion. As this is happening, Okonkwo is caught in an exile for him and his three wives and children. The exile is caused by an accidental killing of a boy by Okonkwo. After they return to Umuofia after seven years, they are blindsided by

Things Falls Apart tells of the tragedy that takes place when people are out of their place. The first half of the novel contains relatively routine events in the life of Okonkwo. It is not until the second half, when the Europeans arrive, that his life is significantly disrupted. Achebe says that, to Conrad, it is very

Okonkwo is also incredibly aggressive. He regularly physically abuses his nuclear family and does so to make himself seem more masculine. His violence in order to protect his fragile masculinity goes to the extent that “his wives, especially the youngest, lived in perpetual fear of his fiery temper.” (2.12) After the missionaries arrive in Umuofia and Okonkwo’s

To the reader of Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo is the most important character in the book as he is the main character and all occurrences revolve around his life. Okonkwo’s life doesn’t just encompass one paragraph of one chapter, it is contained in an entire book. To the District Commissioner, Okonkwo is no one of consequence, just somebody who tried to escape punishment by committing suicide. For this reason, the District Commissioner thinks that Okonkwo deserves only one paragraph that would make him known solely as a “man who had killed a messenger and hanged himself”

At one of his breaking points he killed a missionary in front of the whole clan with his machete and just walked away.(151) Okonkwo believed the reasons of his setbacks were not because of him, but it was because of the White Men, who he believed corrupted everyone to join him had corrupted his chi in a different way. He didn’t think at all it was his fault that his chi had gone bad and had stopped his progression of becoming the best and strongest of the clan. Okonkwo had given up on his life because of the Western ideas, he believed in the old ways and their traditions not these new ideas, he was pressured and pressured himself to the point where he had ended his own

In the novel Things Fall Apart, strength and pride are very important aspects of the main character, Okonkwo, however, these traits may sound like excellent traits to possess but because of the way he was raised, Okonkwo harbours many of his emotions under an outer shell of violence, strength and pride. His traits can be shown by looking at where he has come from in his life, for example, Okonkwo has acquired a large amount of wealth in his life because of his hard work and dedication which he also puts towards his family, unfortunately, his family also suffers greatly because of this due to Okonkwo’s high expectations of his children and his violent ways when they do not live up to them. Secondly, Okonkwo possesses hidden emotions that

In the novel novel Things Fall Apart, the author, Chinua Achebe, wants the character Okonkwo to be viewed as a highly masculine and strict brute. Throughout the novel there are glimpses of the harsh qualities that Okonkwo possesses that start to break. When Okonkwo is exiled to his mother's tribe, he noticed the vast differences between the two. He noticed how feminine and cowardice their actions are, so he starts to easy up and gets a little sense of when to be how he is usually and when to be how the people in his mother's tribe are. Although he starts making changes to how he is as a person, he quickly realizes how weak it makes him look and how weak his mother's tribe is. When the Christians started moving into his mother's tribe, the people of the tribe wanted discuss or compromise with them, but Okonkwo had other ideas. When talking to the council Okonkwo says, “ Let us not reason like cowards… If a man comes into my hut and defecates on the floor, what do I do? Do I shut my eyes? No! I take a stick and break his head” (158). This quote shows how the author wants

“He had a large barn full of yams and he had three wives. And now he was going to take the Idemili title, the third highest in the land” (12). Okonkwo was a successful man in his culture and lands far beyond Umuofia. He was prideful of what he had accomplished from a very young age, his culture meant everything to him as he had made his way to the top. He had everything he ever needed, the honor, he was a warrior, and he had made it to the top from absolutely nothing that his own father did for him. Sadly, towards the end of the book, Okonkwo had broken clan rules on purpose and killed himself. “Then they came to the tree from which Okonkwo’s body was dangling, and they stopped dead.” (Achebe 207). In this quote, it explains that Okonkwo had hung himself on the tree killing himself even though it went against everything he believed in; bravery, customs, and masculinity. Okonkwo’s personal pride was his response to the cultural collision because he was to stubborn to change his culture. He had shown resistance but also went against the clan rules. Okonkwo’s response to the colonizers shapes the meaning of the work as a whole by his suicide signifying things falling apart since it was the first time he purposely had broken the clan law. This shows that he had been struggling with any type of change in the book and finally he couldn’t adapt to any change. He was a

In “Things Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe is a book that represents the causes and effects and the best and the worst of the main character, Okonkwo. Throughout the novel, Okonkwo always displays being brave yet being harsh with people and himself. Okonkwo displays his personality various times throughout the novel. Because his behavior, a lot of events take a major turn in the novel. His pride in his tribe/religion, the act of keeping titles, and trying not to become his father, are three reasons of why he acts the way he is.

Some of the villagers, including Okonkwo, wanted to organize an uprising against the village. He even executes one of the white men. After he does , he understands that the other villages have changed excessively. They won't help him battle the white men off. Not able to live with his disclosure, Okonkwo commits suicide. This is an important part in the novel, because according to Okonkwo's traditional beliefs committing suicide is considered to one of the greatest sin. Okonkwo's desperation about his changing village is stunning in the event that it can exceed his strict adherence to the traditional

In the novel Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, things fall apart for the character Okonkwo because of his character traits. Okonkwo is a very structured man with little patience for whatever he believes is wrong. Some of Okonkwos negative character traits include his violent temper, which gets him in trouble with his religion, clan, family and the missionaries, and his constant battles with his own father which cause him to believe in what is wrong, even if he is aware of what is right. As well, Okonkwo being such a structured man is a good feature of his personal nature, but even this has a negative effect on his life. Okonkwo is an extremely complex character created by Chinua Achebe, and his life falls apart because of all of these

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,

When the new religion is brought over by the white men, Okonkwo strongly opposes to it because he felt that its qualities display weakness and would destroy the Ibo culture. He refused to change and stuck to his old ways, but as more and more of his clansmen convert, Okonkwo sees his world start to crumble. “Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer stand as one” (Achebe 176). His clan slowly divides into two clear-cut sides, but the Ibo people didn’t want to fight back the new religion. As a result, Christianity took over everything, from the government, to the judicial system. Feeling powerless, Okonkwo commits his final act of vengeance and kills a messenger, committing suicide soon after. If the Umoufia had tried to fight back Christianity, they wouldn’t have loss so much power this quickly. This reluctance was due to the absence of