Okonkwo the Novel Things Fall Apart by Essay

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Okonkwo

The novel Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe is a story about the culture clash that occurs when white colonizers arrived on the African continent and attempted to force the indigenous population to accept the empirical culture. When the white people arrived in Africa, they perpetrated a campaign of superiority upon the indigenous peoples. They enslaved Africans and forcibly shipped them to toil on plantations for the rest of their lives. They also attempted to convert people from their native religions and force them into accepting Christianity. With this set up, it would be easy to make all white characters evil and all the African characters as purely good. However, Achebe does not do this. Instead the main character Okonkwo is a troubled, "problematic" hero who performs actions which are not at all heroic or good which makes him more complex and ultimately more real which is shown in the way he behaves towards others, in his personality, and finally his murder of an innocent person without any real reason for committing the action.

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Okonkwo is the protagonist of the story and his conflicts within his own village and with the white colonizers are at the center of the novel. He remained unmoved by the white agenda and was uniquely able to comment on the changes in his community when he was finally able to return to Umuofia. Achebe writes, "Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart" (152). Okonkwo blames the white man and his belief system for all the changes in his community. He is adamantly against change and unwilling to see any potential good in the new system or in the improvements made by the missionaries leading him to act negatively in the name of cultural preservation.

There are other issues with Okonkwo throughout the novel's narrative which makes it difficult to identify with this character. Early in the novel, Achebe defines Okonkwo in unpleasant terms.….....

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