I’ve never played this game before, so forgive me if I don’t know the rules. I find it a rather interesting transition from The Bell Jar to Things fall Apart. I find that the latter is the more enjoyable one so far simply because Achebe is telling us a story, while in the former Plath is trying to make a political statement. As I look around to get the feel of things, I find that almost everyone's view of Okonkwo and Unoka is more or less the same or very similar. Unoka is a lazy man with no thought to the future or any power in the tribe, therefore he is considered to be a failure. Okonkwo is a very hard working man with a lot of power and possessions therefore he is not a failure. I understand these things and yet I beg to differ. (one might even argue that Unoka is very successful at doing nothing, but that’s beside my point) We see Okonkwo with all these things: power, a title, wives, yams..., and yet he has not happiness. On the other hand Unoka has nothing: no title, no position, no yams or barns or whatever, while at the same time he is content. All he needs is his drink and his flute and you can see his “face beaming with blessedness and peace”(5) And while I’m not saying that we should follow his example of how to live, I’m just saying that there is more to failure that not being materially successful, and there is more to true success than having everything. In the end I think we will find that this book is asking us this question; “what is failure/success?”
Okonkwo’s greatest fear is of weakness, we all know that. But we see that this has become his greatest weakness. Far too often in society (both in the book and in ours today) there are many traits that are considered strengths and many that are regarded as weaknesses, and yet in reality those ‘strengths’ are actually weaknesses and those ‘weaknesses’ are really strengths. For example, Nwoye cried when he heard that Ikemefuna was leaving and for this he was beaten. Crying is a weakness, and yet it shows a strength in that you have loved and cared for someone besides yourself. Okonkwo is beginning to see this in himself and because of his society and how his life is ruled by his passions and anger, he resents himself, taking it out on those around him. We see examples of both anger and its opposite, love/compassion/care, conflicting in a number of places in the story, one when after shooting his wife in rage, he breathes a heavy sigh upon learning that she was not harmed(39). There is a war going on inside Okonkwo’s heart, a struggle between being seen as ‘weak’ and becoming truly strong. Sometimes the only way to be stuong is to accept your weaknesses and open your eyes and see them for their strength. When all is said and done Okonkwo will find that out, I think.
As I see what other people are writing, I find that there is a lot of negativity towards the role of women in this society. All I hear is how awful it is that women are lower and how that’s wrong and people asking how they can live with that….etc. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that there is not a problem here, I’m just saying I think that we’ve diagnosed it incorrectly. As I pondered all this stuff, I remembered the words of St. Paul the Apostle in his letter to the Ephesians: “Wives be subject to your husbands, as unto the Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the Church… Husbands love your wives, as Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her.”(ch 5) In order for any being to function there must be a head and there must be a body. You can’t have a body without a head and vice versa, each are equally necessary though neither are more important than the other, each are equally dependant on the other While neither is better or more important, one is higher than the other. The fact that the women in this book are submissive is not what’s wrong, they are holding up their end of the bargain. Serving others, respecting their husbands, accepting a position of humility, is that not what St Paul talks about? Someone stated derogatorily that Akueke was like a servant and treated the others as master and yet all she did was serve her suitor and his family, what’s wrong with that? Why are we so afraid of humility? The problem is not with the women, they are doing just as they are called to do: making up the body. The problem here is with the head. St Paul calls men to “love…as Christ loved.” How did Christ love? He died for the body. Christ, as head, gave up himself entirely for the sake of the body, holding nothing back. This is how a being can function, if the head leads and gives up himself, and the body follows and is subject to the head The society in this book has a pretty hot body, but his head has grown far too big. The men have taken the humility of the women and become lords over them, dictators, and heartless masters. This is the problem. These men do not “love their wives” as is necessary. “Loving” in this sense is a complete self-giving. Well, it’s not happening in this culture. In fact this kind of “love” is seen as weak and one cannot be strong in that situation (68).The women have the right idea; the problem is that the men are jerks.
This is a very baffling section of reading. Not a whole lot of plot, but a lot of stories: the coming of the suitor (ch8), the mosquito (pg75), the ogbanje(ch9), the snake-lizard (pg83), the trial (ch10). I’ve been thinking (uhoh) about these stories, specifically the snake-lizard and how there has to be some reason behind it. As I though, I came up with a reason and while it may be way off, it’s all I could think of. (Foreshadowing?) The snake-lizard is Okonkwo. He is giving his son, Nwoye, seven baskets of vegetables; expectations of who he should be and what kind of man he should become. Nwoye is not living up to that. He is given seven baskets, and yet he comes away with only three, as he falls short of what was expected. For this Okonkwo rejects him, kills his spirit. Okonkwo then will look at himself and see that he himself cannot live up to those kinds of expectations, no one can. He will find out that no one can be given seven baskets of vegetables to cook and end up with still seven. And then, who knows, perhaps he will end up like the snake-lizard and kill his own spirit…
things fall apart ch 11-13 Interesting! I can’t say it was entirely unexpected. The whole book thus far seemed to lead us to Okonkwo’s downfall. Everything he had has been striped away. He is left with virtually nothing: no power, no position, (no title I’m sure), no possessions, no yams…hmm…sounds like I’ve seen this before. His father, Unoka, had nothing. Now Okonkwo is in that same position. I found it interesting that the god they worship, Agbala, is called by his priestess “the god who cut down a man when his life is sweetest to him.”(107, just before the accident) Well, that man is Okonkwo. The question now is how will he react? Like his father and be able to find happiness regardless of the situation, or will he slip into hatred, because he has become like the very thing he feared most, and was determined not to become. He has become a failure. I hope that he will begin to realize the fact that no one requires ‘stuff’ to be a man. True manliness comes from within, not from the outside and from stuff. I hope that he will accept in himself the positive qualities that he inherited from his father. What Okonkwo is searching for is a balance (whether he knows it completely or not). His father was a bum and a happy man; Okonkwo is a successful man but is not happy. Okonkwo is trying to rid himself of his father’s failures, the problem is that he is pushing the pendulum way too far and ridding himself of all of his father’s strength. He needs to find a middle ground where he is hardworking and happy. He already knows what its like to be hard working, maybe now, with his exile, he will figure out how to be happy. I hope that through this misfortune Okonkwo will learn how to be a man. I am very eager to start part two and find out what’s in store for Okonkwo and even more to find out how he will react.
things fall apart ch 14-18 I’ve been thinking a lot about the first page of this book, before the start of the 1st chapter. On it is four lines from the poem “The Second Coming” by W.B. Yeats. It baffles me as to why Achebe has used this in the beginning of the novel. Does he have it in there just for the four lines or does the whole poem mean something? Anyway, I happened to be leafing through a literature book and I stumbled across it completely by accident. So I thought I’d share it and part of its explanation.
“The Second Coming -1921 Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear 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 cast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in the 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 sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
…Yeats saw human history as governed by the turning of a Great Wheel, whose phases influence events and determine human personalities…Every two thousand years comes a horrendous moment: the Wheel completes a turn; one civilization ends and another begins. [This] new age is always announced by birds and by acts of violence. Thus the Greek-Roman world arrives with Zeus in swan’s form and the burning of troy, the Christian era with the descent of the Holy Spirit–as a dove-and the Crucifixion. [When Yeats wrote this] a new millennium seemed imminent. What sphinx-like savage deity would next appear on the earth, with birds proclaiming it angrily? Yeats imagines it emerging from Spiritus Mundi; Soul of the World, a collective unconscious from which a human being (since the individual soul touches it) receives dreams, nightmares, and racial memories.”
Like I said, the question running through my mind is whether this poem is relevant to the novel or is it just those first four lines? I guess we’ll have to find out. Anyway, I just thought I’d toss that out there.
things fall apart ch 19-21 I find myself desperately calling out to Okonkwo to wake up. There is nothing that happens without reason and this misfortune that has happened was for Okonkwo’s good; to see his failures and find his strengths; to become the man that he is. And yet he is impatient and these seven years have become “wasted and weary years”(pg 162). All the time that he spent in exile in his motherland he spent discontented, wanting something else. Like the years of ones youth are wasted and not appreciated when all thought and energy is given to the future and there is no regard for the present. This time was meant for growth but Okonkwo would not grow when all his energy was on the fact that he could have grown more elsewhere. Now that he has returned he sees that the grass is not greener on this side and all his plans of a warrior’s return and the like are not fulfilled. I find that when all seems hopeless and it’s obvious that the center is falling apart, I really want to find that glimmer of hope; the hope that Okonkwo will wake up and snap out of it, and then rise to be a man. So I grasp at straws and desperately gather all hope. There is growth in Okonkwo. Not as much as I would like or as much as there could have been, but never the less, there is. We can see a little by the difference in the way he thanked his friend last section and the way he thanked his kinsman in this section. Last section he asked his friend how he could ever thank him, (he was told to kill himself. Pg142) but in this section he realizes that there is nothing he can do to repay his relatives. “It is not to pay you back for all you did for me in these seven years. A child cannot pay for its mother’s milk. I have called you together because it is good for kinsman to meet.”(pg 167) In this we also find that he is beginning to understand the bond of family and the importance of good company. We begin to see more expressed emotion. He is beginning to open up (slightly). “Okonkwo’s head was bowed in sadness”(175).And we see through out the section that yes Okonkwo is still angry and violent and blood thirsty, but it is no longer directed for himself. It is for his clan and for his descendants, and for the tribe that he is angry. He is not as self-centered any more. “Okonkwo was deeply grieved, and it was not personal grief. He mourned for the clan.”(183).
things fall apart ch 22-the end Alas, the deed is done. Though we all saw tragedy lurking at the end, it nonetheless is saddening to the heart when at last in the end tragedy rears its head. Never the less, I find this novel to have been most enjoyable (far better than “The Bell Jar” in my opinion). Although in the end Okonkwo failed, I believe that he ended a better man then he began. All his life he had centered his whole being on just that: his whole being. His entire life was about always being the best nothing less than that. He wanted to be opposite his father, even though he was blind to who his father really was, and he saw his father as a bitter failure. That was his goal in life: to be the opposite failure. He struggled through out his life to attain his own selfish goal. And then, at the end, he realized that not everything was about him. He put it all aside to fight for what he really believed in. He devoted all his energy, he put his entire being, into saving what he believed in: his tradition, his clan, his world, his very life. In the end his clan died; his world failed and crumbled to the pressure of the white man. This shock was too much for Okonkwo. Finally, when he began to see more than Okonkwo, when he learned to fight for something besides himself, he found that he was the only one left fighting. His world fell apart and even though he was never man enough to face his fear, he did become man enough to forget about himself. He devoted all his energy to his clan and in the end when his clan ended so did he.
On a side note, my very good friend Susie wanted me to tell you this: “yams are delectable, amen.”
Creon’s fault does not lie in the fact that he was firm or made a law that he expected everyone to follow or was adamant about justice, it’s that he went too far with his authority; he overstepped his bounds as king. He expected everyone to obey his law (and rightly so, he is king), the problem came when he presumed to put his law above the law of the gods. In his pride he thought that, as king, he was supreme and what he thought was what the gods think as well. And, of course, since he is king he must know more then anyone else and therefore cannot allow himself to listen to any reason aside from his own. This is his hubris, and, obviously, it leads to his ruin. And yet I still like him, because in the end he does overcome himself and wake to his senses. In the end he realizes that he is wrong and he puts aside his stubborn pride and immediately he does everything in his power to right his wrong. Even though his repentance came to late to save him from his fate, it did come.
Didn't the passage of background information say that Antigone was a victim of Creon's hubris? Some of you are suggesting that Antigone is the tragic hero. Thoughts on that.
9 comments:
I’ve never played this game before, so forgive me if I don’t know the rules. I find it a rather interesting transition from The Bell Jar to Things fall Apart. I find that the latter is the more enjoyable one so far simply because Achebe is telling us a story, while in the former Plath is trying to make a political statement. As I look around to get the feel of things, I find that almost everyone's view of Okonkwo and Unoka is more or less the same or very similar. Unoka is a lazy man with no thought to the future or any power in the tribe, therefore he is considered to be a failure. Okonkwo is a very hard working man with a lot of power and possessions therefore he is not a failure. I understand these things and yet I beg to differ. (one might even argue that Unoka is very successful at doing nothing, but that’s beside my point) We see Okonkwo with all these things: power, a title, wives, yams..., and yet he has not happiness. On the other hand Unoka has nothing: no title, no position, no yams or barns or whatever, while at the same time he is content. All he needs is his drink and his flute and you can see his “face beaming with blessedness and peace”(5) And while I’m not saying that we should follow his example of how to live, I’m just saying that there is more to failure that not being materially successful, and there is more to true success than having everything. In the end I think we will find that this book is asking us this question; “what is failure/success?”
Okonkwo’s greatest fear is of weakness, we all know that. But we see that this has become his greatest weakness. Far too often in society (both in the book and in ours today) there are many traits that are considered strengths and many that are regarded as weaknesses, and yet in reality those ‘strengths’ are actually weaknesses and those ‘weaknesses’ are really strengths. For example, Nwoye cried when he heard that Ikemefuna was leaving and for this he was beaten. Crying is a weakness, and yet it shows a strength in that you have loved and cared for someone besides yourself. Okonkwo is beginning to see this in himself and because of his society and how his life is ruled by his passions and anger, he resents himself, taking it out on those around him. We see examples of both anger and its opposite, love/compassion/care, conflicting in a number of places in the story, one when after shooting his wife in rage, he breathes a heavy sigh upon learning that she was not harmed(39). There is a war going on inside Okonkwo’s heart, a struggle between being seen as ‘weak’ and becoming truly strong. Sometimes the only way to be stuong is to accept your weaknesses and open your eyes and see them for their strength. When all is said and done Okonkwo will find that out, I think.
As I see what other people are writing, I find that there is a lot of negativity towards the role of women in this society. All I hear is how awful it is that women are lower and how that’s wrong and people asking how they can live with that….etc. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that there is not a problem here, I’m just saying I think that we’ve diagnosed it incorrectly. As I pondered all this stuff, I remembered the words of St. Paul the Apostle in his letter to the Ephesians: “Wives be subject to your husbands, as unto the Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the Church… Husbands love your wives, as Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her.”(ch 5) In order for any being to function there must be a head and there must be a body. You can’t have a body without a head and vice versa, each are equally necessary though neither are more important than the other, each are equally dependant on the other While neither is better or more important, one is higher than the other. The fact that the women in this book are submissive is not what’s wrong, they are holding up their end of the bargain. Serving others, respecting their husbands, accepting a position of humility, is that not what St Paul talks about? Someone stated derogatorily that Akueke was like a servant and treated the others as master and yet all she did was serve her suitor and his family, what’s wrong with that? Why are we so afraid of humility? The problem is not with the women, they are doing just as they are called to do: making up the body. The problem here is with the head. St Paul calls men to “love…as Christ loved.” How did Christ love? He died for the body. Christ, as head, gave up himself entirely for the sake of the body, holding nothing back. This is how a being can function, if the head leads and gives up himself, and the body follows and is subject to the head The society in this book has a pretty hot body, but his head has grown far too big. The men have taken the humility of the women and become lords over them, dictators, and heartless masters. This is the problem. These men do not “love their wives” as is necessary. “Loving” in this sense is a complete self-giving. Well, it’s not happening in this culture. In fact this kind of “love” is seen as weak and one cannot be strong in that situation (68).The women have the right idea; the problem is that the men are jerks.
This is a very baffling section of reading. Not a whole lot of plot, but a lot of stories: the coming of the suitor (ch8), the mosquito (pg75), the ogbanje(ch9), the snake-lizard (pg83), the trial (ch10). I’ve been thinking (uhoh) about these stories, specifically the snake-lizard and how there has to be some reason behind it. As I though, I came up with a reason and while it may be way off, it’s all I could think of. (Foreshadowing?) The snake-lizard is Okonkwo. He is giving his son, Nwoye, seven baskets of vegetables; expectations of who he should be and what kind of man he should become. Nwoye is not living up to that. He is given seven baskets, and yet he comes away with only three, as he falls short of what was expected. For this Okonkwo rejects him, kills his spirit. Okonkwo then will look at himself and see that he himself cannot live up to those kinds of expectations, no one can. He will find out that no one can be given seven baskets of vegetables to cook and end up with still seven. And then, who knows, perhaps he will end up like the snake-lizard and kill his own spirit…
things fall apart
ch 11-13
Interesting! I can’t say it was entirely unexpected. The whole book thus far seemed to lead us to Okonkwo’s downfall. Everything he had has been striped away. He is left with virtually nothing: no power, no position, (no title I’m sure), no possessions, no yams…hmm…sounds like I’ve seen this before. His father, Unoka, had nothing. Now Okonkwo is in that same position. I found it interesting that the god they worship, Agbala, is called by his priestess “the god who cut down a man when his life is sweetest to him.”(107, just before the accident) Well, that man is Okonkwo. The question now is how will he react? Like his father and be able to find happiness regardless of the situation, or will he slip into hatred, because he has become like the very thing he feared most, and was determined not to become. He has become a failure. I hope that he will begin to realize the fact that no one requires ‘stuff’ to be a man. True manliness comes from within, not from the outside and from stuff. I hope that he will accept in himself the positive qualities that he inherited from his father. What Okonkwo is searching for is a balance (whether he knows it completely or not). His father was a bum and a happy man; Okonkwo is a successful man but is not happy. Okonkwo is trying to rid himself of his father’s failures, the problem is that he is pushing the pendulum way too far and ridding himself of all of his father’s strength. He needs to find a middle ground where he is hardworking and happy. He already knows what its like to be hard working, maybe now, with his exile, he will figure out how to be happy. I hope that through this misfortune Okonkwo will learn how to be a man. I am very eager to start part two and find out what’s in store for Okonkwo and even more to find out how he will react.
things fall apart
ch 14-18
I’ve been thinking a lot about the first page of this book, before the start of the 1st chapter. On it is four lines from the poem “The Second Coming” by W.B. Yeats. It baffles me as to why Achebe has used this in the beginning of the novel. Does he have it in there just for the four lines or does the whole poem mean something? Anyway, I happened to be leafing through a literature book and I stumbled across it completely by accident. So I thought I’d share it and part of its explanation.
“The Second Coming -1921
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear 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 cast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the 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 sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
…Yeats saw human history as governed by the turning of a Great Wheel, whose phases influence events and determine human personalities…Every two thousand years comes a horrendous moment: the Wheel completes a turn; one civilization ends and another begins. [This] new age is always announced by birds and by acts of violence. Thus the Greek-Roman world arrives with Zeus in swan’s form and the burning of troy, the Christian era with the descent of the Holy Spirit–as a dove-and the Crucifixion. [When Yeats wrote this] a new millennium seemed imminent. What sphinx-like savage deity would next appear on the earth, with birds proclaiming it angrily? Yeats imagines it emerging from Spiritus Mundi; Soul of the World, a collective unconscious from which a human being (since the individual soul touches it) receives dreams, nightmares, and racial memories.”
Like I said, the question running through my mind is whether this poem is relevant to the novel or is it just those first four lines? I guess we’ll have to find out. Anyway, I just thought I’d toss that out there.
things fall apart
ch 19-21
I find myself desperately calling out to Okonkwo to wake up. There is nothing that happens without reason and this misfortune that has happened was for Okonkwo’s good; to see his failures and find his strengths; to become the man that he is. And yet he is impatient and these seven years have become “wasted and weary years”(pg 162). All the time that he spent in exile in his motherland he spent discontented, wanting something else. Like the years of ones youth are wasted and not appreciated when all thought and energy is given to the future and there is no regard for the present. This time was meant for growth but Okonkwo would not grow when all his energy was on the fact that he could have grown more elsewhere. Now that he has returned he sees that the grass is not greener on this side and all his plans of a warrior’s return and the like are not fulfilled. I find that when all seems hopeless and it’s obvious that the center is falling apart, I really want to find that glimmer of hope; the hope that Okonkwo will wake up and snap out of it, and then rise to be a man. So I grasp at straws and desperately gather all hope. There is growth in Okonkwo. Not as much as I would like or as much as there could have been, but never the less, there is. We can see a little by the difference in the way he thanked his friend last section and the way he thanked his kinsman in this section. Last section he asked his friend how he could ever thank him, (he was told to kill himself. Pg142) but in this section he realizes that there is nothing he can do to repay his relatives. “It is not to pay you back for all you did for me in these seven years. A child cannot pay for its mother’s milk. I have called you together because it is good for kinsman to meet.”(pg 167) In this we also find that he is beginning to understand the bond of family and the importance of good company. We begin to see more expressed emotion. He is beginning to open up (slightly). “Okonkwo’s head was bowed in sadness”(175).And we see through out the section that yes Okonkwo is still angry and violent and blood thirsty, but it is no longer directed for himself. It is for his clan and for his descendants, and for the tribe that he is angry. He is not as self-centered any more. “Okonkwo was deeply grieved, and it was not personal grief. He mourned for the clan.”(183).
things fall apart
ch 22-the end
Alas, the deed is done. Though we all saw tragedy lurking at the end, it nonetheless is saddening to the heart when at last in the end tragedy rears its head. Never the less, I find this novel to have been most enjoyable (far better than “The Bell Jar” in my opinion). Although in the end Okonkwo failed, I believe that he ended a better man then he began. All his life he had centered his whole being on just that: his whole being. His entire life was about always being the best nothing less than that. He wanted to be opposite his father, even though he was blind to who his father really was, and he saw his father as a bitter failure. That was his goal in life: to be the opposite failure. He struggled through out his life to attain his own selfish goal. And then, at the end, he realized that not everything was about him. He put it all aside to fight for what he really believed in. He devoted all his energy, he put his entire being, into saving what he believed in: his tradition, his clan, his world, his very life. In the end his clan died; his world failed and crumbled to the pressure of the white man. This shock was too much for Okonkwo. Finally, when he began to see more than Okonkwo, when he learned to fight for something besides himself, he found that he was the only one left fighting. His world fell apart and even though he was never man enough to face his fear, he did become man enough to forget about himself. He devoted all his energy to his clan and in the end when his clan ended so did he.
On a side note, my very good friend Susie wanted me to tell you this: “yams are delectable, amen.”
Creon’s fault does not lie in the fact that he was firm or made a law that he expected everyone to follow or was adamant about justice, it’s that he went too far with his authority; he overstepped his bounds as king. He expected everyone to obey his law (and rightly so, he is king), the problem came when he presumed to put his law above the law of the gods. In his pride he thought that, as king, he was supreme and what he thought was what the gods think as well. And, of course, since he is king he must know more then anyone else and therefore cannot allow himself to listen to any reason aside from his own. This is his hubris, and, obviously, it leads to his ruin. And yet I still like him, because in the end he does overcome himself and wake to his senses. In the end he realizes that he is wrong and he puts aside his stubborn pride and immediately he does everything in his power to right his wrong. Even though his repentance came to late to save him from his fate, it did come.
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