Things Fall Apart Novel Analysis

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Chapter I THE PROBLEM Introduction African literature has tended to reflect the cultural and political phases of the continent because African fiction has been very much influenced by culture and politics. Beginning from the colonial days, African fiction spans the succession of cultural clashes and political crises which have beset the continent. For the countries in Africa, the experience of colonialism plays an important role in the process of understanding their history. Postcolonial studies critically analyze the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, which is based on basically two things – knowledge and power. Nigerian author Chinua Achebe once wrote that the time and place in which he was raised was “a strongly multiethnic, multilingual, multi-religious, somewhat chaotic colonial situation” (Education 39). No better words could describe the Nigeria from the end of the 19th century to today’s 21st (Guthrie, 2011). Most of the writers in Africa use their works to explore and portray these themes. In Home and Exile, Chinua Achebe defines his writings as part of a “process of re-storing peoples who had been knocked silent by the trauma of all kinds of dispossession” (79). In his essay, “The Novelist as Teacher” (1988), Achebe expresses his purpose as an Igbo writer, which is “to help my society regain…show more content…
The Igbo society presented in the village novels is a self-sustained community which still retained their myths, beliefs, customs, religion, proverbs, tales and taboos with an utmost sense of duty. They made their own laws and rules in accordance with their culture and tradition. The selfless submission of the individual will to that of the community preserved their social solidarity for centuries. But all these undergo drastic change with the intervention of the white

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