Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe - Essay Example

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. Okonkwo’s Failure to Accept the Change for the Better Okonkwo also represents of the author’s affinity for the African indigenous culture. He strongly resists the disturbing presence of the colonial people in his society. His response to the European colonial presence is obvious in the following lines: “Does the white man understand our custom about land?

How can he when he does not even speak our tongue? But he says that our customs are bad; and our own brothers who have taken up his religion also say that our customs are bad” (Achebe 45). He protests against the conversion of the members of his tribes to Christianity. For Okonkwo, the colonizers are the agents of destruction. So he strongly despises them. In the novel Achebe shows that social institutions like justice, sense of right and wrong, culture, family and familial values, etc are context-specific social constructs.

The society in Igbo has its own social and cultural values. But the white missionaries in Igbo disturb this system, to a great extent, for the people’s good. In Okonkwo’s society what the members consider manliness is brutality according the values of the Christian missionaries. Evidently according to the author’s proposition that a society may justly have a culture, values and other social institutions, these social constructs are quite right for the people of that particular society. But in no way, he could deny the harmful impacts of the gullible values of the society of Igbo.

A society in which hierarchy and social rank is determined by one’s masculinity that often turns into cruelties like infanticide and oppressive patriarchy can never be based on a universal sense of justice. Indeed Achebe shows that such superstitious sense of right-wrong and justice must succumb to a better and more universal one. Okonkwo’s Suicide Induced by Cultural Frustration The first and foremost theme of Achebe’s novel is the disastrous significances of the encounter between European and African civilizations.

He depicts the social and psychological conflicts of the self-contained African tribal society with the invading whites’ culture. Obviously a part of this conflict consists of the subsequent dismay of the African consciousness. The rise and fall of Okonkwo represents the encounter of the African culture with the Europeans and the following disintegration the best. Indeed the central character Okonkwo himself represents the best and worst of the culture which he belongs to. Thus, he symbolizes this disintegration.

Having the most powerful and being the most renowned one, Okonkwo has to suffer the disintegration of his culture the most. The most important thing in his society is the unity among the members based on their loyalty and absolute obedience to the