Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart

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Chinua Achebe, author of Things Fall Apart, once said, “The damage done in one year can sometimes take ten or twenty years to repair.” In this quote, Achebe is referring to the damage that the Christian religion did to the Nigerian culture. Achebe is the author of Things Fall Apart, a book that he wrote to spread knowledge of this damage. The main character of Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo, is a very strict man and his son, Nwoye, is deemed womanly by Okonkwo. Nwoye, to compensate, does everything he can to appease his father. He is unsuccessful in doing this and when some Christian missionaries arrive in his village, he leaps at the opportunity to escape his father’s wrath. The missionaries impact Nwoye because before the missionaries arrived,…show more content…
Nwoye is deemed a ‘womanly’ person by his father because of his lack of initiative. According to the narrator: Okonkwo’s first son, Nwoye, was then ten years old but was already causing his father great anxiety for his incipient laziness. At any rate, that was how it looked to his father, and he sought to correct him by constant nagging and beating. And so Nwoye was developing into a sad-faced youth. (Achebe 13-14) Okonkwo, even at the beginning of the book, acknowledges that his son is very passive and strives to fix him before he has his own family to care for. Because Okonkwo thinks that Nwoye is so lazy, Nwoye tries his best to be masculine. Nwoye thinks…show more content…
During their exile in Mbanta, Nwoye is curious about the new Christian missionaries. The narrator states, “But there was a young lad who had been captivated. His name was Nwoye, Okonkwo’s first son. It was not the mad logic of the Trinity that captivated him. He did not understand it,” (Achebe 147). Nwoye is fascinated by this new religion because of how different it is from that of the Ibo. Because of his father being so negative towards him, Nwoye leaves his family to join the missionaries. In the following conversation, Nwoye announces that he is finished with dealing with his father, “‘I am one of [the Christians],’ replied Nwoye. ‘How is your father?’ Obierika asked, not knowing what else to say. ‘I don’t know. He is not my father,’ said Nwoye, unhappily,” (Achebe 144). By saying that Okonkwo is not his father, Nwoye shows that his distaste for Okonkwo has grown so much that he left the family. Nwoye decides to leave his family because of his father’s disapproval of laziness and weakness. Through Things Fall Apart, Achebe shows how African families are ripped apart by the introduction of a foreign government and religion. Many individuals forsook their families because of the introduction of Christianity in the Ibo culture. The narrator talks about Nwoye in this
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