Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe - Essay Example

Indeed Achebe does not tell much about why Okonkwo commits the suicide because he wanted his readers to brood over the death and to provoke them to make the meaning according to their own way. Chinua Achebe cautiously portrays the encounter of two cultures and the ways how the people react to it. The protagonist, Okonkwo, of Achebe’s novel serves as the living symbol of the values and standards of the tribal culture and his silent death necessarily symbolizes his culture’s failure to compete with the invading culture and its subsequent death.

Indeed Okonkwo manifests the best as well as the worst of his culture. Because of his high rank in the society he is the most affected and therefore the worst sufferer who has to suffer the changes induced by the Christian missionaries in his society. He loses his position. A significant portion of his society abandons him as a leader, when he is normally accustomed to enjoy unanimous support and loyalty of the members of his society. Such frustration of Okonkwo simultaneously purports two messages: first, his frustration represents the cultural disorder that has been inflicted by the missionaries upon his society and secondly his frustration appears to be that of the people of higher rank in his society.

Since people like Okonkwo are positioned at the extreme end of the society, it is almost impossible for them to accept the missionary-induced changes like other common people of the society in Igbo. While Okonkwo is not so much worried by the change begins taking place in the society rather he is more anxious by the initiative of losing all his deeds that he developed like his affluence, reputation, designation that near to be replaced by newly produced culture. As he cares highly for these key things, particularly his thoughts of missing qualities of his father to be a respectable character which he could have inherited frustrates him continuously and made his attitude suicidal.

There is also a perceptible