When The Emperor Was Divine Essay

Fear makes people do things that they would not normally do. In Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and “from When the Emperor Was Divine” by Julie Otsuka the theme of fear is revealed through the characters’ actions and the authors’ descriptions.Okonkwo reveals the theme through how hard he works and how he treats his family. The mother and the boy are affected by fear by changing how they act around the camp. All of the characters’ actions change based on their fear. Fear affects the choices that the characters make. The mother in “from When the Emperor Was Divine”, “burned all of the letters from Kagoshima” (Otsuka 547) and many more of their family’s Japanese heirlooms out of fear. The reason she burns all of the Japanese heirlooms is to be concealed from the Americans and to assimilate into the preferred culture. In Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo reveals the theme through how he treats his wives and how hard he works. Okonkwo’s “whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness” (Achebe 13). Okonkwo is afraid of being viewed as weak and feminine like his father, so Okonkwo tries to do everything that his father hated. The true intentions of the characters are overshadowed by fear that leads them to make poor decisions.

Achebe describes Okonkwo’s fear as being “more intimate than the fear of evil and capricious gods and of magic, the fear of the forest, and the forces of the nature, malevolent, red in tooth and claw” (Achebe 13). Achebe’s description of Okonkwo’s fear helps show the theme of fear in Things Fall Apart. In “from When the Emperor Was Divine” when the boy walked passed a guard tower, “he pulled his cap down low over his head and tried not to say the word” (Otsuka 539). This shows that the boy was fearful of the guard. Both of the authors’ descriptions show the theme of