Specified Cultural Analysis: Things Fall Apart Imagine losing everything that you had that held a significance for you, your status in your community, your wealth, and your family members. You would naturally try to find that point in your life where things fell apart and the unravelling began. The protagonist of Chinua Achebe’s, “Things Fall Apart”, Okonkow was not able to figure out what event caused his life’s tipping point. What was the reason that his life and his “chi”, his personal god, were out of synch? Okonkow’s fear is the most palatable emotion throughout his story.
Okonkow’s fear of being thought weak, an ineffective leader, and losing his position in the village, actually led to most of his reactions and decisions in his life.
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The compensation for the loss of the Umofia daughter was done to avoid a war because the Umofia clan had a reputation as being skilled warriors (Achebe, 1994). This method of dealing with righting wrongs has an extremely civilized feel to it. No other lives were lost and the debt was repaid with no hard feelings. Additionally, war had to be approved by the village Oracle and was not to be engaged in lightly (Achebe, 1994). With the gift of Ikemefuna to Umofia the stage has been set for Okonkwo’s downfall to begin. Achebe stated that the primary purpose of his novel “Things Fell Apart” was, “…to help my society regain belief in itself and put away the complexes of the years of denigration and self-abasement” (Gagiano, 2014, p. 1075). To accomplish that goal, the protagonist of his novel had to lose everything that was dear in his life, including his station in the community. The African view of a person does not take into consideration only the individual; the status is in fact defined by the position and standing in the community itself (Oyowe, 2014). Again, to lose that standing is devastating to the