Paper 2 Analysis

Prompt 3 – Discuss the significance of social status in Things Fall Apart, and comment on its contribution to characterization.

First of all, Things Fall Apart is a novel in which Chinua Achebe addresses the people that have a misconception of Africa, and the Africans to transmit the idea that the people from Africa are individuals with values, customs, and spiritual believes instead of animals that behave like savages, as the European authors described the Africans when the first missionary journeys were carried out by missionaries from England. Throughout the text Chinua Achebe portrays the life of an African individual, originally from Nigeria, called Okonkowo who experiences how the ideology of the missionaries being different to the ideology that his tribe has break the harmony in his tribe and separating  it.

In the novel, Chinua Achebe describes the importance of religion, and social status, in the Igbo culture, which is Okonkowo’s culture. Chinua Achebe explains in the novel through the use of Okonkowo, that the social status is one of the most important things in the Igbo culture. Achebe shows that social status is not determined by family, or name, but by individual achievements. To portray this, Achebe shows that Unoka, Okonkowo’s father, was a lazy man without any titles, and a man with many debts that never had success in cultivating yam seeds, only having an unproductive land. On the other hand, Okonkowo was a very hard working individual since a pretty early age, who had been a successful worker of the land that ended up possessing many yam crops obtaining a complete different status than his father’s. Besides of that, Okonkowo becomes known in all the tribes for becoming the best wrestler of Umoufia after defeating the cat. To achieve all of this success, Okonkowo uses his father as a bad example of individual, to push himself to the success.

In the Igbo culture, all the individuals that died without any achievements, or titles, were not buried, but carried to a forest called the forest of the evil, were they were left there. As Okonkowo did not want to face the same fate as his father, he develops a harsh and rude attitude that allows him to work hard, and obtain titles. Even though his rude and harsh attitude helps him to achieve a high social status, it also contributes to problems that he has to face that end up turning his bad fortune to a bad fortune.

Besides of that Achebe portrays Okonkowo in the novel, as an individual that hates weakness, or laziness, and as an individual that responds to these attitudes with violence, and mercilessly, produced by his automatic instinct that cannot bear seeing his father’s attitudes that lead to failure. An example in the novel that shows how Okonkowo’s social status leads him to have a rude, and merciless attitude, is when he kills a child that he had been raising in front of some leades of his tribe, to not show weakness, and therefore, degrade his social status. Furthermore, not only in this situation, but during the whole novel, social status contributes to show Okonkowo’s attitude, like for example in the week of peace of the tribe, Okonkowo does not respect it beating his wife for not preparing the food, and being outside doing other things. In this situation Okonkowo, being aware of the kind of status that he has, he cannot allow his wife to do this to him, therefore having to beat her, to show here that serving him is such an important thing to do, that cannot be forgotten.

Lastly, in the death of Okonkwo, Achebe shows that Okonkowo, considering himself the bravest individual of the tribe, having won many wars, and being recognized as a war hero, decides to kill the commissioner that comes to the market to stop the meeting, which afterwards, it is the reason why he hangs himself.