Things Fall Apart Quote Analysis

The Power of One It only takes the will power of one to start a chain reaction but sometimes that gets drawn out by the crowd. “If you can’t run, you crawl. If you can’t crawl– you find someone to carry you.” (Joss Whedon) This quote is represented through the character Okonkwo in the novel Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, because he had this willpower and perseverance to be a leader, also to represent his village with great strength, but not soon after he got shut down and drowned out due to the European missionaries coming to Umuofia and attempting to replace the peoples of Umuofias culture, also their beliefs.. Okonkwo was viewed as the idle leader with values showing great strength in his village, but that gift or power was soon lost

Unoku was described as lazy and also improvident that was described (Achebe 4). As Okonkwo saw this as he grew up he realized he wanted to be nothing like his father. As Okonkwo grew up and his father passed, Okonkwo started to get his life together from scratch also “He was a healthy farmer and had two barns full of yams, and just married his third wife” (Achebe 8), but this is when life was great until he realized the villages was changing around him. The people in the village didn’t carry that same strength Okonkwo presumed they had, leading to the fall of Umuofia and the fall of Okonkwo with his gift of being strong also being a factor into

Now Okonkwo’s gift of strength and perseverance was now crumbling, but he also kept reflexing his emotions with feeling like a woman, which makes sense for this time period, but him putting his emotions off like this is leading to toxic masculinity. “ ‘When did you become a shivering old woman,’ Okonkwo asked himself, ‘you, who are known in all of the nine villages for your valor in war? How can a man who has killed five men in battle fall to pieces because he added a boy to their number? Okonkwo, you have become a woman indeed.’ ” (Achebe 65). This idea that he feels that he has become a woman for feeling emotions and not covering them up with strength but also the stubbornness he has adopted throughout the years. With Okonkwo being in exile for a significant amount of time he has grown to become weak not physically but mentally as the book moved forward he could be related to a flame burning out and turning into a pile of ashes (Achebe 153). How it shows he is burning out and this gift of strength he had is now dying out due to him being sent to exile, also having no titles to his name. He had nothing to live for nor feel confident in, especially with part of his family now