Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe is an award winning and acclaimed novel about the struggles of Africans during the period of colonization. Things Fall Apart does deviate at times away from it's main genre but it also in many stretches of the book, shows the traits of being a historical fiction book or a tragedy story.
Achebe uses realism in his story to create his fictional characters and he uses a realistic approach when illustrating how the characters interact with one another throughout the story. Achebe puts the real and true values of the Igbo culture and components/pieces of the culture to get his message across. The kola nuts, beatings of Okonkwo's wives, crime and it's consequences, harvesting and marriage all show the realistic components of the Igbo Culture. The relationship between Okonkwo and his wives show how in reality people in the Igbo Culture behave with their wives. Achebe makes good use as well of the roles each character has in the film as it adds a very deft touch to the novel and makes the novel flow more towards a realistic historical type of fiction. Differentiating between what Igbo men and women had to do and what their roles were in their respective daily lives shows how realistic this story is. These components make the novel look like a very realistic fiction overall.
On the other side of the story, Achebe makes his novel look more like a tragedy and something that is more fictional overall. Achebe creates a lot of moments which overall affect Okonkwo's personality and he goes on to show throughout the story the decline of Okonkwo and all the problems he is facing. From almost shooting his wife, killing Ikemefuna, Killing Ezeudu's son and to all the way hanging himself at the end of the story, Okonkwo has been portrayed as a very much tragic hero in the story which makes the book look more like a tragedy. Okonkwo starts off being the top man in his town of Umuofia, he is portrayed as the complete person, a man who is a top wrestler and has the most wives which thus makes him to be one of if not the most wealthy people in Umuofia. Okonkwo's demise then starts to begin from internal problems with his family in the beginning to then overall problems with his town and nation. These components make the book seem more like a tragic story as it focuses more on the life of one person and how it declined rapidly compared to focusing on collectively the entire town of Umuofia as a whole.
The novel can also have a view on it's history and historical context overall. The novel does focus soon on the missionaries from England coming to Nigeria and colonizing them. In reality the same colonization period did occur as missionaries came from England to Nigeria and colonized them. Things Fall Apart can have a purpose on showing the effects of colonization and some of the impacts of it on people in Nigeria. Although many of the characters in the novel took the colonization very lightly, Okonkwo didn't and was completely shocked on how Umuofia changed. The novel can show the negative impacts of colonization through the character Okonkwo alone.
There are many different perspectives overall on seeing what is the mian genre of the book Things Fall Apart. Achebe overall doesn't set a particular genre to have in this book but he clearly wants the book to encompass all the various components in his mind from elements of Igbo culture to the colonization and he wants to make the book more suitable to audiences from all over the world so that they can relate to the book in one way or another compared to making it only suitable and relatable to people of his own culture.
No comments:
Post a Comment