Things Fall Apart Analysis by Chinua Achebe

Things Fall Apart is a novel written by Chinua Achebe in 1958. The main character, Okonkwo, is a tragic hero. The reader sees his rise to success and his following destruction because of his hamartia: his obsession of not becoming like his father, who represents femininity, gentleness and calmness. This obsession makes him have a very toxic concept of masculinity that clashes with how Ibo culture views gender.

Ibo society had a patriarchal structure, and the only difference with European cultures was that the family structure was polygamous: the man can be married with more of one woman at the same time.

Men held leadership positions on the community, and they were farmers and warriors. Women assumed the role of mothers, wives, traders and farmers in a physical realm; and priestesses and healers in a spiritual one. Women are essential in this society although his role can be perceived as secondary. “They are important culturemakers, nurtures and custodians of family wholeness.”

Nevertheless, Okonkwo’s behaviour is not the norm and he is not a representative of Ibo culture.

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“It is true, that he embodies the qualities that the Ibo people admire: strength, courage, bravery; but at the same time, Okonkwo exemplifies, rather forcefully, those attributes that his people loathe: impatience, violence, arrogance, intolerance and extremism.” Ibo culture encourage individuals to achieve a balance between male and female qualities within themselves, and they put in high esteem people without excesses. Ibos tried to set conflicts in peaceful ways while praise the warrior’s strength.

“They admire courage, strength and success, the Ibo are fast to caution us that the coward outlives the warrior!”

Indeed, Okonkwo cannot achieve the balance that Ibo people admired, because his problem, from the beginning, is that he rejects the female qualities. Okonkwo’s personality is shaped because of his father, Unoka, who was a pacific and generous man but a failure in Ibo society norms (he had not enough money to provide for his family). Unoka was considered an Agbala, a ‘man without title’, word with a pejorative association with femininity. Okonkwo’s deepest fear is becoming like his father, a failure, a feminine man; and he tries everything to not be like him. With that mindset he builds himself around toxic masculinity. He associates violence with masculinity, so he becomes more aggressive and brutal than his fellow Ibos. He represses his emotions because he thinks that make him weak and “unmanly”, so when he killed his adoptive son, and suffers and feels sadness and pain because of that, he pushed his feelings away. Okonkwo hates everything associated with women, coding them as weakness, cowardice and sentimentally. He despites everything from psychological concepts like gentleness and kindness, to mundane things like the stories that women told to their children, labelled them as “silly women’s stories”, without acknowledging their work of transmitting history from one generation to the next.

However, readers might think that his pre-colonial sexist behaviour is the norm in Iboland. Jeyifo claims: “Okonkwo’s representation of “femaleness” as weakness and irresoluteness seems to have validation in the system of division of cognitive and perceptual categories in his society which ascribed the designation “female” to smaller crops like the cocoyam and the designation “male” to bigger crops like yam, a system which also described an “ochu” (abomination) as either “female” or “male” depending on the degree of threat or destabilization to the social order that it poses.” This system relates to the patriarchal structure of Ibo society, but it is stated throughout the novel how Okonkwo behaviour is the exception of the norm. An example it is the scene of the judgment, where a family is denouncing a man for beating his wife. Chapter before the novel narrates how Okonkwo punched his wife and broke the Week of Peace. This violent behaviour is unique of Okonkwo and it is not connected with Ibo culture. Not all Ibo men share Okonkwo’s views of gender. They are gentle and nice men with their wives. That can be illustrated in the conversation in Obierika’s house, where the oldest man in the village died but the drum has not been beaten because his first wife has died moments after him. Obierika “express his admiration for a great warrior who is able to affirm and celebrate his wife without downplaying his own strength” .

In addition, Obierika can be seems as the contra-point of Okonkwo. Obierika “was a man who thought about things” while Okonkwo “was not a man of though by action, a man of war” . Obierika “is the ultimate fulfilment of his tribe's concept of balance and elegant good breeding” . He is successful in Ibo terms and questioning his own society does not challenge his masculinity. He knows the importance of female qualities within him and embraces them.

According with Nwando Achebe: “Okonkwo’s downfall can be attributed to his systematic rejection of the female qualities within him in order not to appear weak” His total dedication of masculinity makes him a flawed hero. He could not see que value of compassion, kindness and other female qualities. He remains in the same one-track-mind during all the novel, without evolving and changing. In Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe wrote “the clan was like a lizard, if it lost its tail it soon grew another”. Society evolves to accommodate the European colonialists for its survival. Okonkwo fails to see that and his pride for his traditions, that gives him the place of a strong warrior, make him seek revenge against the Christian missionaries. At the end, he commits suicide, feeling betrayed by his people and not knowing how to fit in to a changing world in the aftermath of colonialism when a new order without his traditions and sense of manhood is does not rules Umuofia.

To sum up, Things Fall Apart analysis shows that it is a classic tragedy of man whose hamartia, toxic masculinity due to his fear of weakness and failure, clashes with his own culture. Instead of embracing balance and his female qualities, he pushes a model of masculinity that converts him in a violent brutal man and is not able to adapt in the world after colonialism.