Analysis Of Chinua Achebe's 'Civil Peace'

992 Words4 Pages
“We need to look carefully at what we value, what we have, and what we desire to make sure these are really important to us and represent what we really want.”-Ilici Lee. Everyone desires to have valuable objects that are worth awe-inspiring amounts of money while others value the simple treasures in life that they already have. The world we live in has defined valuable as something that is worth a splendid deal of money. On the other hand, treasure has been defined with two different perspectives. One perspective is that a treasure is wealth such as money, jewels, precious metals.The other definition is something of great worth or value and wealth of any kind. However, valuable means something different to each individual. The treasures and valuable items that people contain, vary on the cost, but mostly all have an emotional attachment to the person. Primarily in “Civil Peace” by Chinua Achebe, the short story represents Jonathan Iwegbu who lived in Nigeria and told his story of the aftermath of the Nigerian Civil War and had a very poor lifestyle which contained no valuable items moneywise. Jonathan lived in a place where money was immensely scarce not only for himself, but for everyone who lived there as seen by the fact that some people were required to steal from others in order to survive. Jonathan’s personal treasures were full of an emotional value. For instance, Jonathan considers himself extraordinarily lucky and blessed to be alive along with his wife