Okonkwo In Things Fall Apart

In Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe, Okonkwo’s perception of strength gets the best of him, ultimately tearing his family apart. Even from a young age, he considered his father, Unoka, to be a failure. He was, “lazy and improvident and was quite incapable of thinking about tomorrow” (4). Unoka never worked hard, causing his family to grow up poor and barely have enough to eat. Because of this, Okonkwo views his father as weak and feminine, ultimately doing everything to avoid ending up like him. He, “was ruled by one passion-to hate everything that his father Unoka had loved. One of those things was gentleness and another was idleness. (13)” Okonkwo is determined to be nothing like his father, pushing an even bigger wedge between him and

Nwoye already has a bad relationship with his father to begin with, as he has to pretend to be someone he isn’t in order to avoid punishment. As long as he feigns interest in his father’s stories and not in his mother’s “women’s stories”, then he will not be beaten. Furthermore, when the oracle tells Okonkwo that he must kill Ikemefuna, he does so because he feels the need to be strong. Even when his own adoptive son is begging him to save him, he “drew his machete and cut him down. He was afraid of being weak. (61)” He would rather execute his own son than be seen as weak in front of the rest of the village. However, this doesn’t sit well with his other son, Nwoye. After he learns that his father murdered his brother, he slowly distances himself away from Okonkwo and ends up converting his faith because his own faith has failed him. It didn’t protect him from his father’s wrath nor protect Ikemefuna from death. Once Okonkwo hears about this, he flies into a fit of rage. His first plan of action is to use his machete and massacre the missionaries and their followers, but he then thinks to himself, “Nwoye was not worth fighting for… how then could he have begotten a son like Nwoye, degenerate and effeminate? (153)” Had Okonkwo never killed one of his sons and beat the other into submission, they might still both be with him. In the end, his perception of strength is so unrealistic to the point where instead of being what holds his family together, it is what ultimately tears it