Okonkwo Character Analysis

    In Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo is largely significant to the development of not only the story’s plot, but also the development of characters and the understandings in the story. In regards to the story’s plot, Okonkwo’s characterization is highly stubborn in terms of its ability to evolve and adapt. Okonkwo, through his stubbornness, hangs on to his culture’s values and traditions in his all-consuming fear of being seen as weak alike his unsuccessful and title-less father Unoka. His stubbornness to not change causes conflict between the people in his village, Umuofia, to a point where he is seen as extremely violent to his first son, Nyome; enough so to cause him to convert to Christianity when the British missionary arrives. As well, he is banished from the village for 7 years through his careless acts of violence such as beating one of his wives in the Week of Peace and killing the 16-year-old boy accidentally with his gun. This conflict leads to the village trying to fight off the British but, in the end, Okonkwo loses his followers and finds that he is alone in his fight. Due to his stubbornness, he did not put the safety of the village and its people first and caused the British to fight back through their self-imposed law to a point where the people were too fearful to want to fight the British. Okonkwo, at this realization, kills himself in despair. It is through this that Okonkwo symbolizes manliness, violence, loyalty and how he represents his culture.

    Okonkwo’s character is the embodiment of Umuofia’s cultures and values: protective, strong, loyal, violent, non-explanative and barbaric in its beliefs. Okonkwo, through being the embodiment of his village’s culture, has the purpose of showing how the culture and, in turn, the people of that culture live and struggle in their lifestyles. Okonkwo struggles with his confidence as he finds that everything he does must lead to success or that he will be seen as weak in both his mind and body to a point where he will be labeled and seen as someone alike his title-less and unsuccessful father, Unoka. This fear pushes him to become violent to women, who are title-less from birth as they are women, and to men and boys who are lazy, alike his first son Nyome. He is shown to be disappointed in his son until Ikemefuna, a boy from another village put under Okonkwo’s care, pushes Nyome to start working ‘men’s’ jobs and become more productive, to Okonkwo’s delight. Although, against the village elders’ advice, Okonkwo joins other men in his village when they take Ikemefuna to be killed as instructed by the Earth goddess. He gives the killing blow and returns to his life in the village to only be banished for 7 years a ‘womanly murder’. When he returns, he rises up against the British and their laws and religion: Christianity. In this, he is the embodiment of the Igbo culture fighting against the new-coming British and Christianity. Okonkwo begins to lose those around him to the British: his son, Nyome, to Chritianity, and his fellow tribes people to the British when they do not rise to fight with him. When he realizes that they have given up on the Igbo culture, Okonkwo commits suicide, a sin to the culture. This personifies the defeat of the Igbo culture by the British and betrayal of the Igbo people to their own culture. Through his story, Okonkwo contributes to big ideas, the first being that things, like cultures, change throughout the centuries through the evolution of technology, laws, beliefs and ideals. The second big idea is that colonization of nations and cultures, such as the Igbo culture, can cause the downfall of cultures and a people in violent ways that can cause the culture to be left behind or allow the culture to be destroyed from the foundations where the people of that culture destroy what is left of their past cultures. The third big idea being shown by Okonkwo’s character is that, for cultures to survive alongside other cultures, understandings must be shared and cultures must each adapt their images of other cultures. An example is where the British saw the villagers as brutes while Okonkwo and other men in the village saw the British as enemies.

TFA - Key Moment Ranking

Moment #1: Intro to Okonkwo’s fear of failing and being a failure like his father

  The first important moment that I have chosen from Things Fall Apart is the scene in Chapter Two when the novel describes Okonkwo’s true fears and how his whole life revolved around them. As said in the novel, “[Okonkwo’s] whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness. . . It was not external but lay deep within himself. It was the fear of himself, lest he should be found to resemble his father. Even as a little boy he had resented his father’s failure and weakness, and even now he still remembered how he had suffered when a playmate had told him that his father was agbala.” It is from this scene that we are given insight into what Okonkwo’s character is: proud, stubborn and fixated on his image. From this cemented characterization of Okonkwo, we are able to understand the beginnings of his inner conflicts of aiming to be unlike his father in every aspect, even as to go so far as to aim to never fail in his life in any task, from as big as planting a field to one of his matches.

Moment #2: Okonkwo killing Ikemefuna and afterwards

  This second important moment that I have chosen is when Okonkwo, after being told for his own good to not come with the village men to kill Ikemefuna, came and gave the killing blow to Ikemefuna after, as stated in the novel, “He heard Ikemefuna cry, 'My father, they have killed me!' as he ran towards him. Dazed with fear, Okonkwo drew his matchet and cut him down. He was afraid of being thought weak.” This moment was important as it further emphasized Okonkwo’s character of fearing the image of being weak and showing how much he would sacrifice to keep his strong and successful image. Even to go so far as to give the killing blow to the child he raised and had called and thought of him as a father. This connects to the context as well of how some of the rituals performed by the Igbo villages were brutal and sometimes barbaric as innocents and bystanders were placed in harm’s way to appease the gods and goddesses that they worshiped and listened to.

Moment #3: When Okonkwo killed the head messenger and realized that the tribe would not fight the white men

  The third important moment that I have chosen in Things Fall Apart is when Okonkwo killed the head messenger where, as stated in the novel, “'The white men whose power you know too well has ordered this meeting to stop.' [said the head messenger.] In a flash Okonkwo drew his machet. The messenger crouched low to avoid the blow. It was useless. Okonkwo's machet descended twice and the man's head lay beside his uniformed body . . . Okonkwo stood lookingat the dead man. He knew that Umuofia would not go to war. He knew because they had let the other messengers escape." This moment shows the conclusion to both the external and internal conflicts that Okonkwo is subject to. The external struggles of fighting to keep out the white men and their beliefs and rules from the Igbo culture and villages make Okonkwo violent in nature and give context of how the village people of the lands that now create Nigeria were once hesitant and, at some times, violent and enraged by the idea of being forced into the law and belief system of the outsiders, otherwise known as the British. The internal struggles can also connect to this context as many of the people who were part of the revolution had to be able to find balance in their minds and hearts to see how to truly free themselves from the British rule, abandoning the idea of keeping the separate villages, which was a great sacrifice to their individual cultures, and instead moving to creating an independent country of Nigeria. By Okonkwo killing himself, we are able to see the novel’s theme of how, alike the title reads, ‘Things Fall Apart’ or, things don’t last forever. In this case, the brutal and somewhat backwards law and belief system of the Igbo villages is what could not last forever as, with everything from cultures to countries to technology to ideas, things never stay the same and are always changing. With Okonkwo killing himself, we are able to fully view the process of change from a man that once despised those who failed or lacked the effort to not fail to someone who committed the worst crime and had chosen to not put the effort to not fail. From this drastic change, we are able to be given an image that represents the theme wholly.

 

TFA Context Post

  Achebe has chosen to set his novel prior to and during the arrival of the colonial administration rather than during the context of production to, firstly, give an unfiltered, non-historically factual and ‘accurate’ description that could lack the understanding and emotional connections that can be felt and expressed by the characters. An example of such emotions could be the fear felt by the village women as the ritual of the spirits (when in reality they are the village men) commences. In this, we are able to feel the fear that these women feel as well as how they respect and admire the beings that have, as believed, taken over the bodies of the village men. When taken into historical and modern terms, these emotions may not be expressed as richly due to the need of giving large amounts of historical context within novels based in the modern era. For example, instead of expressing the fear of the women, if the novel were written in the context of production, the situation may have been described, instead, as “due to the village people’s sacred beliefs of spirits and other mystical ideas, village women largely feared encounters or visits from such creatures, even with the knowledge that the bodies were of the village men living among them.” This alone lacks the emotional understanding that Achebe achieved when, instead, setting the novel prior to and during the arrival of the colonial administration. From this, we can continue to the second point which, by reaching this emotional understanding, we can also understand the turmoil found in the village when outsiders become powerful and when villagers turn to the colonialist’s religion of Christianity, a foreign and unaccepted concept by the village people. From this description, we are able to also understand Achebe’s possible internal struggle of being both Igbo and Christian, two conflicting cultures that may have affected how he perceives things such as each culture’s celebrations, beliefs and traditions. This alone allows the audience to understand how complex and, possibly, confusing Achebe’s combination of two separate cultures are as well as how complex the less well known Igbo culture is. To move on, there’s also the arrival of the colonial administration in the village that causes large amounts of turmoil and frustration in the village. The village people are seen as barbaric and less to the British when, in reality, the Igbo have their own culture with their traditions and beliefs and celebrations that they hold dear to their hearts. With the British radically changing the Igbo culture through their actions of defilement, in regard to building the church and making the outsiders powerful, as well as implementing a system of laws that differ greatly from those created and followed by the village people. With this, we are able to see just how invasive the arrival of the British is to the soon-to-be-named country of Nigeria and how the locals, at the time, felt trapped and forcefully placed into a confusing and frustrating system by outsiders of unknown origin. From this viewpoint shown in the book by many of the village people, we are able to understand Achebe’s ideas and emotions of the arrival of the British and how he aims to get their influence out of Nigeria, which ties to how he was part of the movement for a British-free, independent country of Nigeria.

Word Count: 560