Points to Ponder
Achebe’s title Things
Fall Apart comes from a poem by W. B. Yeats called “The Second Coming.”
(The first four lines of the poem are: “Turning and turning in the widening
gyre / The falcon cannot hew the falconer / Things fall apart; the center cannot
hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.)
It’s pretty obvious how the words Achebe chose are relevant, but how
does the rest of the poem apply to his novel? What is the novelist’s attitude
to change, seen through the lens of this poem?
Do you see any irony in the relationship between the poem’s Christian
language and the missionary presence in Umuofia?
At what point does the disintegration of Umuofia society seem
ineluctable?
Achebe’s language
in this novel is a mixture of English, Ibo proverbs and untranslated words, and
of course a title taken from the poem “The Second Coming” by Yeats.
What is the effect of this mixture?
What might this suggest about Achebe’s relationship to European
literature? What do you make of the
switch in point of view from Okonkwo and his family to the British Commissioner
that occurs on the last page of the book? What
are the implications of the relationship between the book that the Commissioner
projects writing on the last page, and the novel Achebe has written?
In many ways
Okonkwo resembles the hero of a Greek epic.
What is his tragic flaw? Is
Okonkwo representative of his society—how much of his story could be read as
symbolic? Is Okonkwo a sympathetic
or unsympathetic character? Okonkwo
often fails to reconcile the male and female virtues as they are understood in
Umuofia society, and that plays into the fact that all the disasters which
happen to him result from his offenses against the mother goddess, the earth. How does this relate to the larger plot in the novel, and to
Okonkwo’s final end?
According to Chinua
Achebe, the African writer must be involved in the task of decolonializing the
minds of his or her fellow Africans in the struggle against (neo)colonialism.
In his essay Hopes and Impediments,
he writes: “The writer cannot be excused from the task of re-education
and regeneration that must be done…I for one would not wish to be excused.
I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the
past) did more than just teach my readers [Africans] that their past—with all
its imperfections—was not one long night of savagery from which the Europeans
acting on God’s behalf delivered them.”
In your view, how well does Achebe succeed in this goal?
What are the roles
of women in this novel? Igbo thought conspicuously uses a metaphor of
masculinity and femininity in its principle of balance—male and female
categorize farming crops, types of crimes in the society, kinship structures,
story-telling, religious rites, and of course social roles.
Women are treated like property in this society, and yet the most
important goddess of the society, Ani the earth goddess, is female.
Ekwefi, Okonkwo’s second wife, is able to desert her first husband and
marry Okonkwo for love. What do you
make of these contradictions? Is Okonkwo’s fall in some way an indicator of
the perils of an African machismo—a lack of a moderating female principle—at
play in the society?
