Discussion Questions (Beth De Stasio, 1998)
Discussion Question and Essay Topics (Lifongo Vetinde, 1999)
A Few Discussion Questions (Mark Dintenfass)
The Second Coming (William Butler Yeats)
Long Paper Analyzing Others’ Assessment of Things Fall Apart (T. Rew-Gottfried, 2000)
Comparing and Contrasting Things Fall Apart and A Room of One’s Own (T. Rew-Gottfried, 2000)
Some topics for class discussion (T. Rew-Gottfried, 2000)
Connections to other works (T. Rew-Gottfried, 2000)
· Diagram the family relationships of Okonkwo.
· What do we learn about Okonkwo? What is his self--image? The view of the village? Your opinion? Does Achebe use Okonkwo as a representation of his society, or does Achebe want us to see Okonkwo as an individual?
· How are father/son relationships described in the novel? Are we to share Okonkwo's view of his father? of his son? of his daughter, Ezinma?
· What is the role of women in lbo society? Which things are manly? womanly? Does Okonkwo hold the same views on manly vs. womanly actions as others in Umuofia?
· What is the role of ritual in lbo society? Compare later to the role of ritual for the missionaries.
· How is Okonkwo's personality important to the outcome of the story?
· The story of Ikemefuna's death is told from different points of view: How does that change your response to the event?
· What is the view of law in lbo society? For Okonkwo? Compare to Locke. What is the role of the individual vs. the society in this culture?
· What is the view of evil? How does it compare to "Heart of Darkness"?
· What is the role of folk tales or stories in this culture? In this novel? Is Things Fall Apart a women's story or a men's story? How is it structured?
· What do you learn of the missionaries from this novel? Compare to "Heart of Darkness".
· What is the meaning of the title?
· Compare the image of Africa, Africans and Missionaries/colonists in the two novels.
Group lkemefuna
· What are the different points of view of this story? Why is there more than one?
· How does more than one view change your view of the event?
Group Folk Tales
· What is the role of folk tales in the lbo culture? In the novel? Do the folk tales speak "Truth"?
Group Civil Society
· What is the view of law and custom in Umuofia? What is Okonkwo's view? Others in his community?
Group Okonkwo
· Is Okonkwo representative or an individual for Achebe's purposes? or both? How is Okonkwo's personality important to the story? How do others react to Okonkwo? Does their reaction change?
EVIL
What is the view of evil? What is the source of evil? How
does it compare to Heart of Darkness?
MISSIONARIES/COLONIALISTS
What do we learn of Europeans in this novel? Is there more
than one "type" represented, is there "doubleness" in this
section also? Compare to Heart of Darkness.
FAMILY
What is the role of family in the lbo culture? What is the role of family relationships to the outcome of the plot? Which relationship(s) are the focus of the story?
TITLE
What is the meaning of the title? Which "things" fall apart? Why? What is the reader to--learn from this novel?
When you finish your topic -- spend time noting portions of the text in which European and lbo language are in neighborly contrast.
Okonkwo is destroyed, and brings ruin on others, because he is excessive in his adherence to the values of his society; those who can compromise, change with the times and adjust, are seen as more sensible. This does not make Okonkwo, any less tragic or heroic. Despite Achebe's objective manner of narration, [Okonkwo is] portrayed with the sympathy and achieve noble stature in the course of the novel; the principles [he upholds] are also seen as noble and engage our sympathies. But such principles are often flawed and inherently unsound in the face of social change. Achebe is like [earlier writers] in presenting a tragic universe in which exceptional individuals are crushed by larger social forces. One is tempted to describe it as a deterministic universe, since the causes of the tragedy are inherent within the culture itself and its relationship to larger realities.
---- Bruce King
What Okonkwo cannot accept, finally, is the coming of the white man to the land ... Okonkwo cannot understand how his countrymen could be destroyed rather than defend themselves ... Finally, in despair, Okonkwo proceeds ... to commit the most horrendous of all offenses against the earth goddess----suicide. Thus he ends in disgrace with the community whose preservation obsessed him. His tribesmen cannot even touch or bury him; they can only attempt to cleanse the desecrated ground where he hanged himself. Why does the man [i.e., Okonkwo], his life and his death, move us so? It is, I think, because Okonkwo, perhaps the best among his fellows, sees the imminent danger to that old order which is there life, and more stubbornly than anyone else refuses to give up the old forms for the new formlessness. Such determination as Okonkwo's is heroic. Call it obsession; but it is nonetheless ... the mysteriously stiffing course of a man brave enough to reach beyond his fears to bold action.
---- Robert McDowell
One of the central features of Things Fall Apart is Achebe's balancing of principles through the metaphor of masculine and femenine a metaphor that seems to derive from deep within Ibo thought. Thus, the god who, above all others, regulates life in Umuofia is Ani, the earth goddess. And it is a reflection of Okonkwo's failure, to seek balance between the manly virtues and the womanly virtues as understood in Umuofia, that each of the disasters that afflicts him can be seen as a crime against the earth. One is tempted to say that this is Okonkwo's tragic flaw: he is a man who lives in a culture that requires a balance between "masculine" and "feminine" that he does not acknowledge (in part because he is ashamed of his father who has failed to be a "real man"). And it is through this flaw that he is destroyed. A mark of Achebe's mastery is that he manages to communicate this ideal of balance ... even while describing a culture that will strike many modem readers as overwhelmingly---- even oppressively---- dominated by men.
---- Kwame Anthony Appiah
1. Explain why Achebe begins the novel with an elaborate description of the central character Okonkwo? What do we learn about the values of Umuofians through this presentation?
2. What role does religion play in the downfall of Umuofia? Discuss Mr. Brown and Mr. Smith's methods of evangelization.
3. Critics have suggested that Things Fall Apart has a universal appeal. Do you agree? Explain your answer with elaborate examples from the text.
4. Although Umuofia is a patriarchal society, Achebe constantly points to the centrality of femininity in Igbo culture. In what ways does he draw attention to the fact that the feminine qualities of Igbo culture are important to its survival? (See excerpt #3 of the handout)
5. Achebe is very conversant with Western literature and its traditional forms. He borrows from the tradition of Greek tragedy by centering the story of Things Fall Apart around a tragic hero, Okonkwo. In your opinion, what contributes most to the final tragedy of Okonkwo? Could his fall have been averted? ( See excerpts # 1 and #2 of the handout). Do you agree with Bruce King's and Robert McDowell's assessments? Explain.
6. Achebe develops techniques--and promotes ideologies--whose primary purpose is to contest, and wrestle with, the silent shadows and forms of colonialist discourse... My contention here is that if we do not tune our ears to the written and unwritten discourse that blocks Achebe's attempt to recover the essential forms of Igbo culture in 7hings FaII Apart--whether we believe such recovery possible or not --then we will often miss the value of the novel as a form of cultural formation. The first question we need to take up, then, relates to the strategies Achebe develops to reply to his colonialist precursors, or rather to turn the Western fantasy on Africa upside down, a gesture of reversal ... which makes it possible for Achebe to initiate narratives of resistance. A reading of Things Fall Apart which fails to relate it to the discourse that shadows it, misses the revolutionary nature of Achebe's text.
Simon Gikandi
Examine the strategies of resistance to colonialist discourse on Africa Achebe deploys in Things Fall Apart What his attitude towards Igbo, culture?
7. According to Achebe the African writer must be involved in the task of decolonizing the minds of his or her fellow Africans in the struggle against (neo) colonialism. In his article entitled, "'The Novelist as Teacher" he writes:
Here then is an adequate revolution for me to espouse--to help my society regain belief in itself and put away the complexes of the years of denigration and selfabasement And it is essentially a question of education, in the best sense of the word. Here, I think, my aims and the deepest aspirations of my society meet [ ... ]
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
Chinua Achebe Hopes and Impediments
In your view, how well does Achebe meet his goal as a writer
in Things Fall Apart?
8. Achebe's novel takes its title from the opening verses of "The Second Coming", a poem --by W.B. Yeat's s, an Irish poet, essayist and dramatist.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot bear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood--dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity
This poem captures Yeat's sense of the crumbling of the civilization of his time. How well does it contribute to our understanding of the historical moment Achebe describes in his novel? What aspects of Igbo tradition are "falling apart and what contributes to the disintegration of the society? Is the movement progressive--or sudden? At what point in the novel does it occur to you that the disintegration of Umuofia is ineluctable?
What do we learn about Okonkwo in the first few paragraphs? How do those details prepare us for the events in the rest of the book?
What sort of man is Unoka? Does Achebe mean us to share Okonkwo's low opinion of his father? Is it possible to determine what Achebe's opinions about Unoka are?
What sorts of things does Okonkwo consider manly? What sorts of things does Okonkwo consider womanly? How do his opinions reflect or differ from the general opinions of Umuofia?
In what other ways are Okonkowo's beliefs and attitudes typical of the beliefs and attitudes of Umuofia? In what ways are they different? Should Okonkwo be thought of as representative of his society?
Why is the story told in such a roundabout way, with digressions, folk tales, and even whole chapters (chapter five, for example) devoted merely to descriptions of everyday life?
The various events surrounding Ikemefuna's death are told from several different points of view: how do these shifts in point of view complicate our responses to the event?
What proportion of the book is given over to the coming of white men to umuofia?, what does that suggest about Achebe's purpose?
why is the last chapter told from the point of view of the Commissioner, a character we have not previously met?
What does the book's title (and its source) suggest about Achebe's attitude towards European literature?
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,
The blood--dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is
at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again,-- but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony deep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
--William Butler Yeats
Okonkwo (Oh--kawn--kwoh)--The central character of Things Fall Apart A leader of the African Igbo community of Umuofia (Oo--moo--oh--fee--ah), known as a fierce warrior as well as a successful farmer, although he is a man still in his thirties. He has three wives and several children who live in their homes in his village compound. He is determined to overcome the stigma left by his father's laziness and wastefulness.
Unoka (Ooh--no--kah)--Okonkwo's father, known for his weakness and. lack of responsibility.
Nwoye (Nuh--woh--yeh)--Okonkwo's oldest son, age twelve at the book's beginning. By nature, he is a sensitive young man.
Ikemefuna (Ee--keh--meh--foo.nah)--A boy of fourteen when he is given to Umuofia by a neighboring village to avoid war, he is a clever, resourceful young man.
Ekweft (Eh--kweh--fee)--Okonkwo's second wife, mother of Ezinma, her only living child.
Ezinma (Eh--zeen--mah)--Daughter of. Ekwefi and Okonkwo; Ekwefi's only surviving. child.
Ojiubo (o h--jee--ooh-- boh)--Okonkwo's third wife and Mother of several of Okonkwo's children.
Obierika (Oh--bee--air--ee--kah)--Okonkwo's best friend in Umuofia. He often represents the voice of reason. He is the father of Maduka (son) and Ekuwke (daughter).
Chielo (Chee--eh--loh)--A village widow who is also the priestess of Agbala.
Agbala (Ahg--bah--lah)-- The Oracle of the Hills and the Caves, she influences all aspects of Umuofian life (based on the real Oracle at Awka who controlled Igbo life for centuries).
Mr. Brown-- The first white Christian missionary in Umuofla arid Mbanta, an understanding and accommodating man, he is inclined to listen to the Igbos.
Mr. Kiaga (Kee--ah--gah)-- The native interpreter for the missionaries, he is. a teacher and a leader of the new church in Mbanta.
The Reverend James Smith-- A strict, stereotypical white Christian missionary, he takes over the church after Mr. Brown's departure
The District Commissioner-- A stem, stereotypical white colonial administrator of Umuofia, he follows regulations to the letter and has little knowledge or understanding of the people for whom he tries to administer a new government.
The purpose of this paper is to discuss one of the works from Freshman Studies with respect to critical statements by others. First, you need to decide what you think Achebe is saying with respect to the issue raised, and then you need to decide whether the criticism or analysis of the other person is justified.
“One of the central features of Things Fall Apart is Achebe’s balancing of principles through the metaphor of masculine and feminine, a metaphor that seems to derive from deep within Ibo thought. Thus, the god who, above all others, regulates life in Umuofia is Ani, the earth goddess. And it is a reflection of Okonkwo’s failure to seek balance between the manly virtues and the womanly virtues as understood in Umuofia, that each of the disasters that afflicts him can be seen as a crime against the earth. One is tempted to say that this is Okonkwo’s tragic flaw: he is a man who lives in a culture that requires a balance between “masculine” and “feminine” that he does not acknowledge (in part because he is ashamed of his father who has failed to be a “real man”). And it is through this flaw that he is destroyed. A mark of Achebe’s mastery is that he manages to communicate this ideal of balance… even while describing a culture that will strike many modern readers as overwhelmingly--even oppressively--dominated by men.”
--Kwame Anthony Appiah
Do you agree that femininity is “central” to Igbo culture? Consider evidence from Achebe’s use of images, stories, and/or dialogue in Things Fall Apart to support this claim.
“…Achebe develops techniques--and promotes ideologies--whose primary purpose is to contest, and wrestle with, the silent shadows and forms of colonialist discourse… My contention here is that if we do not tune our ears to the written and unwritten discourse that blocks Achebe’s attempt to recover the essential forms of Igbo culture in Things Fall Apart--whether we believe such recovery possible or not--then we will often miss the value of the novel as a form of cultural formation. The first question we need to take up, then, relates to the strategies Achebe develops to reply to his colonialist precursors, or rather to turn the Western fantasy on Africa upside down, a gesture of reversal…which makes it possible for Achebe to initiate narratives of resistance. A reading of Things Fall Apart which fails to relate it to the discourse that shadows it, misses the revolutionary nature of Achebe’s text.”
--Simon Gikandi
Is Gikandi correct in finding a response to “colonialist discourse” in Achebe’s writing? Identify and examine examples of Achebe using “strategies of resistance” in Things Fall Apart and consider these examples’ effectiveness in challenging the “Western fantasy on Africa.”
Consider one or both of the following statements about Okonkwo as “tragic hero.” Consider what contributes most to the final tragedy of Okonkwo. Could his fall have been averted? Do you agree with King’s or McDowell’s assessments? Explain why or why not.
“Okonkwo is destroyed, and brings ruin on others, because he is excessive in his adherence to the values of his society; those who can compromise, change with the times and adjust, are seen as more sensible. This does not make Okonkwo any less tragic or heroic. Despite Achebe’s objective manner of narration, [Okonkwo is] portrayed with the sympathy and achieve[s] noble stature in the course of the novel; the principles [he upholds] are also seen as noble and engage our sympathies. But such principles are often flawed and inherently unsound in the face of social change. Achebe is like [earlier writers] in presenting a tragic universe in which exceptional individuals are crushed by larger social forces. One is tempted to describe it as deterministic universe, since the causes of the tragedy are inherent within the culture itself and its relationship to larger realities.
--Bruce King
“What Okonkwo cannot accept, finally, is the coming of the white man to the land… Okonkwo cannot understand how his countrymen could be destroyed rather than defend themselves… Finally, in despair, Okonkwo proceeds…to commit the most horrendous of all offenses against the earth goddess--suicide. Thus he ends in disgrace with the community whose preservation obsesses him. His tribesmen cannot even touch or bury him; they can only attempt to cleanse the desecrated ground where he hanged himself. Why does the man, his life and his death, move us so? It is, I think, because Okonkwo, perhaps the best among his fellows, sees the imminent danger to that old order which is their life, and more stubbornly than anyone else refuses to give up the old forms for the new formlessness. Such determination as Okonkwo’s is heroic. Call it obsession; but it is nonetheless…the mysteriously stirring course of a man brave enough to reach beyond his fears to bold action.”
--Robert McDowell
These ideas based on ideas that Lifongo Vetinde and others have developed. If you have other secondary sources that address interesting issues in Achebe’s work, you may show them to me and tell me how you’d use them in this paper.
The purpose of this paper is not merely to discuss one of the works from Freshman Studies on its own terms, but to compare and/or contrast themes or style or philosophical stance in two works. All of the topics listed below necessitate the comparison of Achebe and Woolf.
These are topics that, I hope, will guide your thinking about a thesis. A thesis both narrows the focus of your paper (so that you can actually present a coherent and complete explanation of what you think within the 3-5 pages) and presents an argument. That is, the thesis that you defend (by providing persuasive arguments and appropriate evidence from the texts) must take a position. These are just the beginning of ideas for theses; although they provide an example of how I think out what I’d like to write about, they are not complete--you’d have to work quite a bit more to develop a good paper. Have fun!
Consider the role of wealth and status in Things Fall Apart and A Room of One’s Own. Compare and contrast the viewpoints expressed in the novel and in Woolf’s essay on the importance of wealth for happiness and fulfillment.
Woolf cites Jane Austen and William Shakespeare as paragons of writing. Discuss what attributes Woolf seems most to esteem in them (look, e.g., at pp. 56-57, 68-70 in Woolf). Does Achebe demonstrate these attributes of incandescence in his portrayal of life (and love and marriage and relationships between men and women)? How might Achebe respond to her criteria for “incandescence”?
Achebe introduces a number of folk tales into the story he tells. Woolf’s essay is also punctuated with a number of asides and flights of fancy. What purpose do these apparent “interruptions” of the narrative line seem to serve? Are there parallels between Achebe’s and Woolf’s use of these literary devices, or are they intended for entirely different purposes?
The relationships of women and men are fairly central to both Achebe’s and Woolf’s works. Examine commonalities and differences between Achebe’s and Woolf’s observations about appropriate or desirable social role(s) or mental disposition(s) of women and men.
Achebe and Woolf might each be considered to express a protest about the societies in which they live. Compare and contrast the nature of that protest and how they express it.
These ideas are partly my own and partly based on ideas that Tim Spurgin, Eilene Hoft-March, and others have developed. Obviously, you can develop your own ideas as well. Talk to me about them.
Interesting issues about language--Why is the novel in English and why does Achebe liberally use untranslated Ibo words and phrases? “…proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.” (p. 7). What does this mean? Contrast with the Commissoner’s disdain for the typical discourse style of the Ibo (p. 206)
Okonkwo and his relation to other characters in the novel--Ikemefuna, Nwoye, Unoka.
The role of women in Ibo society. The degree to which women are revered and oppressed.
How does Achebe let us know about Okonkwo. Consider the first paragraph of the novel. Why does he start here? Note the “hybridity” of the description--seemingly “straightforward,” almost prosaic physical description with reference to legendary ancestors who fight with wild spirits.
And then, by contrast, why does the Commissioner get the last word? Is this an example of Achebe’s irony, and if so, are there other examples?
1.
On looking back, if I had an advantage, it was that my father
was a retired missionary when I was growing up; we were Christians and in our
village you had two sides--the ‘people of the Church,’ as we were called, and
the ‘people of the world,’ the others. Although we were in the same village
there was a certain distance which I think made it possible for me not
to take things for granted. I say this because some of the people who grew up
with me, whose parents were heathen, as we called them, these things did not
strike them. At least that is what they tell me today--they took things
for granted.--Chinua Achebe, 1969
Mark Dintenfass quoted this in his lecture on the novel, noting that Achebe
seems not to “take sides” between the Christian missionary and the traditional
Ibo culture. Rather, Achebe “escape[s]
taking things for granted because he was aware of two very different ways of
taking things for granted.” What Achebe
(and Mark) says here seems to resonate with Kuhn’s discussion of Gestalt shifts
due to a change in paradigms. Within a
paradigm, one takes certain things for granted. Kuhn seems to argue that one cannot do science (normal science
anyway) without taking certain things for granted. However, in some sense, the historian/philosopher of science
(viz., Kuhn) can reveal the importance of a paradigm (which includes that which
one takes for granted) in determining how one perceives the world.
2. Things Fall Apart might be called a hybrid novel in that Achebe, a Nigerian, uses an English art form (the novel) and the English language (with occasional untranslated Ibo words) to describe a Nigerian man who confronts English colonial powers. Weiner expends considerable ink in his description of hybrids in Beak of the Finch. What is the biological definition of hybridity? What advantages and disadvantages are there for biological hybridity? Is there a parallel that can be drawn to Achebe’s novel? Does the hybridity of Things Fall Apart lead to its better fitness? Fitness for what adaptive landscape?
3. Natasha Gray has suggested a film entitled Monday’s Girls, which is about three young women (two high-school age and one university student) who undergo a traditional Ibo woman’s initiation in a contemporary rural setting. Film is about 30-45 minutes and treats the issues of tradition vs. modernity, individual vs. community, and women’s power. This film would be interesting in its depiction of women in Ibo society, possibly contrasting with and confirming Achebe’s depiction.
Last
Modified 9/00, Peter N. Peregrine