“Our identity has already been chosen for us; but it is up to us to accept it or fight and change it” (Afnan Ahmad Mia). In the novel, Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe writes Okonkwo as a man descended from weakness, giving him a unrespected identity. Unwilling to accept this Okonkwo fights to change the identity of himself as he lives up to the expectations of the tribe instead of the expectations of his father. Now grown and matured Okonkwo’s sense of identity is well influenced by the traditions of the tribe, but as seen when the colonial powers came to take over, the threat of losing his identity was present. Who is Okonkwo? What made him the way he is? The tribe. It was the tribe’s expectation of tradition that influenced Okonkwo to be the man he is. A mental and physical …show more content…
Okonkwo built himself up by the failure of his father, causing him to work twice as hard for the things he should’ve inherited. Okonkwo made up for his father’s weakness by doing much with a “heavy hand”. For he felt that he had to constantly prove himself a man to the tribe, for “he was afraid of being thought weak”. His mind was set one way as he learned what not to be from his father. The emotions and feelings within Okonkwo had been pushed so far down to avoid the shame, because of that, other emotions were able to be seen. As an illustration, Okonkwo “was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and weakness”, he had seen come from his father. So he started working hard to build himself up. This lead to pride, “...he had called him a woman. [he] knew how to kill a man’s spirit”, for Okonkwo had worked hard for himself and gained