Ministry of Science, Researches, and Technology
Azarbaijan University of Shahid Madani
Faculty of Literature and Humanities
Department of English Language and Literature
Dissertation Presented to the Department of English Language and Literature in Partial
Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts (MA) in
English Language and Literature
A Narratological Reading of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart
Supervisor:
Ahad Mehrvand, Ph.D.
Advisor:
Abolfazl Ramazani, Ph.D.
By:
Fatemeh Zoleykani
August / 2012
Tabriz / Iran
Abstract
Since its publication in 1958 Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart has won global critical
acclaim and has been regarded as one of the most influential texts of postcolonial literature.
The book earned much of its fame due to offering an insight into African culture that had not
been portrayed before. However, the novel has remained virtually unexamined in the area of
narrative discourse. Indeed, too much concentration on the idiosyncrasy of the represented
culture has led many critics to ignore crucial issues of form and technique. The present
dissertation, thus, aims to investigate the role of narrative elements in fashioning the overall
effect of the novel. Gerard Genette’s theory of narrative with its division into three levels of
story, text, and narration turns to be the guiding principle to this thesis. However, this study
would be selective in its discussion of the components of each category. Given that Genette
merely devoted his attention to one level of narrative, that of text, this thesis would
additionally benefit from Seymour Chatman, Mieke Bal, Gerald Prince, and RimmonKenan’s theories on narrative. The results of this dissertation underscore that Achebe made
the most of narrative element in the sense that the presentation of past involved narration,
characterization, and the manifestation of story. In the present dissertation, I argued that the
choice of zero focalization and extradiegetic-heterodiegetic narrator aided Achebe to deliver
an authentic and reliable picture. Achebe’s characters and characterization not only disclosed
the particularity of a pre-colonial society, but also established Things Fall Apart as a classical
novel. And finally, Achebe’s divergent intention in the two parts of the novel influences the
speed and order of presentation. This thesis recommends the simultaneous examination of
narrative elements in Achebe’s No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God, assumed to form a
trilogy with Things Fall Apart.
Key words: Chinua Achebe, Gerard Genette, narrative, story, text, focalization,
extradiegetic- heterodiegetic narrator, speed.
ii
Dedicated
To the sufferings of African slaves and their resistance to darkness
iii
Acknowledgments
The present thesis has received the support of numerous people whom I would like to take the
opportunity to thank. First and foremost, my gratitude goes to my supervisor, Dr. Ahad
Mehrvand for his patience, kindness, and enthusiasm. He read every draft of this dissertation
with remarkable care and offered extraordinarily detailed and helpful suggestions for the
revision process. His thoughtful comments and insights strengthened the argument, helping
me to bring the work to fruition.
Sincere thanks also go to my careful and critical advisor, Dr. Abolfazl Ramazani who read
the final draft of my thesis and whose valuable comments made the appearance of the final
edition of this dissertation possible.
I would like to extend my gratitude to professor Gerald Prince on whom I have imposed with
questions, and I am obliged to him for taking the time to respond to my various e-mail
queries and for pointing me in the right direction. My e-mail correspondence with Prince has
been added to the appendix of the thesis.
I should not miss the opportunity to thank Dr. Bahram Behin who has been an invaluable
intellectual and emotional resource during the past three years and whose classes altered my
definition of literature. It was an honor to be his student.
I am still indebted to Dr. Zachariah Bezdude who generously gave me his M. A. thesis, my
friend Sahar Khalili who kindly took the trouble of sending it, my French Professor Ms.
Mozhgan Gorji for her inspiration, and Asiye Sepehry for her constant encouragement and
wonderful companionship during my two-year residence in Tabriz. Last but far from the
least, my deepest gratitude goes to my parents for their patience and unwavering emotional
support.
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Table of Contents
Abstract ……………………………………………………………………………….…….. ii
Dedication ……………………………………………………………………………….….. iii
Acknowledgments …..………………………………………….………………………..….. iv
Introduction ……………………………………………………..………………………….... 1
Chapter One: The Power of Point of View: The Examination of Focalization and Narrating
Instance in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart… ………………….......................... 26
Chapter Two: “Rudimentary souls” or “autonomous individuals”: The Study of Achebe’s
Character and Characterization ….………………………............................. 59
Chapter Three: The Plotted Story: The Examination of Order and Speed of Presentation in
the Text level of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart ………………………...….. 100
Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………….……........ 126
References …………………………………………………………………………..……… 135
Appendix …………………………………………………………………………………… 146
v
Introduction
1
Narratology is a strand of structuralism that developed in the sixties and seventies mainly in
France. It is the study of narrative as a genre and aims to describe the constant and variable
elements as well as combinations which are typical of narrative to clarify how these
characteristics of narrative text work within the framework of theoretical models. The term was
first coined by Tzvetan Todorov in his 1969 book Grammaire du Decameron to denote the
“science of narrative” (Schmid 18). However, that was not the moment narratology was
conceived. In order to figure out narratology‟s progenitor, one has to go back to Russian
Formalism and French structuralism where figures like Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude LéviStrauss, and Vladimir Propp bestowed inspiration on the search for systematic ways of
understanding narrative that could not be limited by the individual works (Onega 5).
Saussure‟s definition of language as a system and his distinction between la langue
(language viewed as system) and la parole (individual utterance produced on that basis)
provided the foundation for narrative study. Highly independent on that system of thought,
literary structuralists believed that narrative can be understood as a system underlying individual
texts. As Steven Cohan maintains, “narrative poetics is to a given narrative what grammar is to a
given utterance, so a reader‟s knowledge of how narrative operates as a system partly determines
the sense one makes of a text” (53). Thus, literary structuralism examines what all narratives
have in common as well as what enables them to differ from one another.
2
Influenced by Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, a structuralist anthropologist, proposed a model to
study myth which in turn paved the way for the birth of modern study of narrative. Lévi-Strauss
held that beneath “the immense heterogeneity of myth” lay certain universal structures that were
the same for all people and to which any particular myth could be reduced (Onega 10).
According to him, myths were a kind of language which could be broken down into unites and
obtain meaning only through combination in particular ways.
Vladimir Propp, a Russian formalist, generalized Lévi-Strauss‟s model to written stories.
In his Morphology of the Folktale, he analyzed 115 Russian fairy tales looking particularly for
recurring elements or features. In his study, he distinguished between “variable” persons and the
“unvarying plot function” they performed. He asserted that while character or personage of the
tale might be at face value variable, their functions in the tales and the significance of their
actions were “constant and predictable.” Subordinating character to plot, Propp “abstracted”
thirty functions which always appeared in the same sequence. He also specified seven roles
assumed by characters in the folktale: the villain, the helper, the donor (provider of the magical
agent), the sought-for-person and her father, the dispatcher (who sends hero forth on his
adventure), the hero and the false hero (D. Herman 25).
The work of these three figures – Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, and Propp – provided the
guiding texts for the later French structuralism, especially in their search for what in narratology
is called “grammar of narrative.” Drawing on the work of Propp, Algirdas Julian Greimas
revised Propp‟s long list of plot functions into six roles which can be performed by one or more
characters. While Propp made no claim for the universality of the set of his roles, Greimas
provided a set of universal roles or “actants” (Culler 233). He thus created a “typology of general
roles” to which indefinite actors in narrative could be reduced. Furthermore, he concentrated on
3
the relation between these “actants,” arguing that this is the basic structure that makes meaning
construction possible (D. Herman 25). Greimas‟s model consisted of six categories, “three pairs
of binary oppositions,” set in systematic relations to one another: the subject, object, sender,
receiver, helper, and opponent (ibid.).
In Grammaire de Decameron, written in 1969, Todorov also argued for a “grammar of
narrative” from which an individual story ultimately drives. Repudiating Greimas‟s typology of
actants and taking sentence as his model, Todorov compared narrated entities and agents with
nouns, actions and events with verbs, and properties with adjectives (D. Herman 30). He then
proposed to treat character as proper name to which certain qualities are attributed during the
course of narrative. To Todorov, characters are not heroes, villains, or helpers; they are simply
“subject of a group of predicates” which the readers “add up” as they go along (Culler 235).
Similarly, Roland Barthes undertook a structural analysis of narrative, drawing on
linguistic paradigm and suggesting that a narrative is not a “simple sum of propositions,” but
rather a complex structure that can be analyzed into hierarchical levels. Language utterance,
Barthes remarks, is analyzed at the three levels of syntactic, morphological, or phonological
representations; likewise, three levels of description can be distinguished: function, by which he
means action, actions by which he refers to character, and narration (D. Herman 29-30).
Whereas, Propp, Greimas, Barthes and Todorov concentrated on plot and narrative
grammars, narratology in 1970 and 1980 was mostly concerned with discourse and narration
rather than plot. In other words, narratology gradually departed from structure and patterns of the
stories and moved toward the ways stories are told (Fludernik, “Histories of Narrative Theory”
43). Gerard Genette is perhaps the most eminent representation of this narratological tendency.
4
In his Narrative Discourse and Narrative Discourse Revisited, Genette initiated his discussion
with the term recit (narrative) which in French bears three meanings: a statement, the content of
the statement, and the action one performs when producing the statement (Lothe 6). He, then,
distinguished between the three meanings of the word by giving each of them its particular term:
story (histoire), discourse (recit), and narration (narration). The story is the actual sequence of
events as they happen, whereas the discourse or text is the actual words on the page from which
the reader constructs both story and narration. Finally, narration refers to the act of telling the
story to some audience and thereby producing the narrative. (A detailed description of these
three terms would appear later.) Genette‟s focus was directed to narrative, “the words on the
page,” but he notes that all three levels work together. In other words, to analyze a work, he
separated aspects of a text that do not operate separately to discover how they cooperate (Tyson
228).
Gerald Prince and Mieke Bal were among the most influential narratologists coming after
Genette. Prince not only refined “Genettean model” by inaugurating the concept of narratee (a
figure in a text whom the narrator addresses), but also provided the extensive definition of
“narrativehood” or what makes a narrative narrative (Fludernik, “Histories of Narrative Theory”
41). Bal, a Dutch scholar, proposed a “controversial” extension of Genette‟s theory of
focalization (a term Genette used instead of point of view and identified three categories of zero,
internal, and external focalization). While Genette exclusively gave attention to the act of
focalization, Bal argued focalization needs both a focalizer and an object of focalization.
Accordingly, she distinguished between the one who is focalizing and what is being focused
upon. Bal, thus, rewrote Genette‟s model which was based on the limitation of perspective – zero
focalization versus limited external or internal focalization – into a “neat binarism” of focalizer
5
and focalized. She also extended narratology to cover film, ballet, and drama. (Fludernik,
“Histories of Narrative Theory” 41-42)
Another important figure in the „modern” study of narrative was Seymour Chatman. In
Story and Discourse, Chatman concentrated on the two fundamental levels of narrative- story
and discourse- and extended the definition of narrative to cover a variety of narrative media,
especially film. He was one of the first critics who analyzed film as a narrative genre and
introduced the concept of “cinematic narrator” to film studies (ibid.).
When narratology was invented in the late 1960‟s, historical and cultural contexts as well
as interpretation were lost (Keen 7). It held this very view that narrative, without the aid of any
extrinsic factors, is describable and its working can be explained comprehensively. Adhering to
Roman Jakobson‟s distinction between poetics and criticism, narratologists privileged “the code
of narrative over particular stories supported by that code,” and pursued narrative poetics, not
narrative criticism (Fludernik, “Histories of Narrative Theory” 31). Thereby, they were not after
producing entirely new reading of a text; rather they frequently highlighted how the text manages
to have certain effects, thus providing arguments for existing interpretations of the text.
In short, narratology claims to deliver a set of instruments for analyzing texts. Utilizing
this toolbox, the present study aims to investigate the employment of narrative elements in
Chinua Achebe‟s Things Fall Apart. This study will unveil Achebe‟s method of narration and the
exploitation of the different levels of narrative in his work. In its attention to the narrative
components, this study is after excavating the role and significance of these elements in
engendering the overall effect of the novel. Providing a detailed discussion of narrative
conventions and operations, the narratological reading of Things Fall Apart will additionally
6
supply readers with a terra firma upon which they could construct their further interpretation of
the novel.
Chinua Achebe is perhaps the most famous African writer in the history. He has won
numerous international prizes for literature and has been praised “as the father of modern African
novel” (Stratton 22) and as one of the “Makers of the Twentieth Century” (sic) (Levine).
Achebe‟s works alongside that of Edward Said‟s are considered the first postcolonial attempt at
“challenging the cultural hierarchies imposed by decades of political and cultural hegemony”
(AbdelRahman). Achebe particularly owes his fame to his anti-colonial response to Joseph
Conrad‟s Heart of Darkness. In his article “An Image of Africa” appeared in 1975, Achebe
accuses Conrad of racism. He objects Heart of Darkness on the ground that it reinforces the
“traditional” separation of Europe from Africa on the basis of their “supposed” civilization and
barbarism. Achebe holds that despite his remarkably powerful creative capabilities, Conrad
purveys “the old comforting myth” of Africa‟s former colonizers (Hopes and Impediment 2-6).
However, it was Joyce Cary‟s novel Mister Jonson that inspired him to write a counter-narrative.
Offended by the caricature of Nigeria in Cary‟s work, Achebe, through Things Fall Apart “writes
back” to the western canon, corrects the wrong representation of Africa, and restores to his
people an awareness of the dignity of pre-colonial Africa (Snyder178).
Most of the writing about Africa generally and Nigeria specifically in the late nineteenth
century and early twentieth century was produced by the colonial power (Slaughter 72). Things
Fall Apart, thus, appears as an inside perspective of Africa to support Achebe‟s nation. As
Fadwa AbdelRahman observes, through this very novel, Achebe “decodes the deep-seated image
of colonial representation and re-codes new images of the self.” In an interview with Barbara
Ellington, Achebe asserts that “the novel is a specific book, because it was written when I began
7
to see the necessity for the world to understand the story of Africans not as represented by
visiting Europeans but told by African themselves.”
Things Fall Apart, Achebe‟s first novel, is the most widely read African novel in
English. Since its publication in the 1958, it has been translated into nearly fifty languages and
has sold millions of copies around the world. It is considered to be the most impressive account
in English of an African culture and the impact of European upon it (Shaffer 12). Re-reading
“canonical English texts,” the novel not only provided a true portrait of Africa, but also initiated
a new era in African literature (Stratton 23). Written in the eve of Nigeria‟s independence,
Achebe‟s novel explores the effect of colonialism on a small Nigerian village at the turn of the
nineteenth century. As Obierika, a character in the novel, observes “the white man has put a
knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart” (162). The novel depicts the
rise and the fall of its protagonist, Okonkwo, whose inability to adapt leads him to suicide. In
Things Fall Apart, Achebe provides a vivid picture of Ibo society, disclosing the positive as well
as negative aspects of Ibo culture, and discusses its social costumes, political structure, religion,
even social festivals and ceremonies.
Given that Things Fall Apart falls in the domain of postcolonial literature, one might
propose the question of irony in approaching the novel from narratological perspective. Whereas
narratology is concerned with the text‟s formal operations, postcolonial criticism, to borrow
Edward Said‟s term, is attentive to “materiality” of the text or its relation to the world. To Said,
structuralism, in its blindness to the historical and cultural context spawning a particular text,
“misses” the fact that literature is “an act located in the world.” Treating literature as an inert
structure, Said holds, is to “divorce” the text, which is a “cultural object,” from the relation of
power within which it is produced (Ashcroft and Ahluwalia 18). The materiality of the text, Said
8
contends, gains crucial importance for postcolonial texts, not only for their capacity to represent
the world, but also for “their aim to actually be in, to intervene, the world” (Ashcroft and
Ahluwalia 22).
The Achilles‟ heel of structuralist narratology is expanded as David Herman highlights
the failure of this very approach to account for the “the problem of fictional reference” (31).
Indeed, these deficiencies brought structrualist narratology to its death nest so that a new
“phoenix,” to use Angsar Nunning‟s term, would rise out of the ashes of the old one (255).
Despite these imperfections, this text-oriented theory appears obliging as it is concerned with
“how” the novel means “what” it means. Having understood what permits the text to enjoy
meaning, one would arrive at a clearer interpretation of the novel.
In “Chinua Achebe and the Invention of African Culture,” Simon Gikandi praises Achebe
as the inventor of African literature as an “institutional practice.” Alluding to Achebe‟s important
precursors, Gikandi claims none of these writers had the effect Achebe had on the establishment
of an African literary tradition. He also highlights the role of Achebe‟s Things Fall Apart in
reclaiming African‟s lost dignity (5-6). Given the weight of Achebe‟s novel in the cultural and
political realm, attention is mostly devoted to the response the work gives to the colonialist
discourse. The significance of this study, thereby, surfaces in its highlighting the role of narrative
in supplying such a response, a process which is undoubtedly affected by textual features and
structures. Investigating Things Fall Apart from this additional theoretical perspective, delivers a
fuller picture of the novel than is at present available.
Achebe has elicited considerable critical attention. In addition to a good deal of articles,
there are several books devoted to his work. Things Fall Apart, perhaps one of the most famous
novels of the twentieth century, has been the subject of varied critical debates, embracing variety
9
of approaches. However, the early European responses to this work were rather harsh. An
anonymous reviewer identified only with J. H., for instance, held that Things Fall Apart is about
“primitive rites, the witchcraft, and superstious savagery as well as the more acceptable facets of
heathen existence” (qtd. in Parekh 27-28). R. C. Healy was another example who viewed
Achebe‟s novel “unsophisticated, devoid of any sense of plot or development … a plain and
unravished storytelling in the best primitive tradition” (qtd. in Parekh 27-28). Another case was
pointed out by Achebe himself in his “Colonialist Criticism” where he quoted an unusual
appraisal of the novel by Honor Tracy: “These bright Negro barristers…who talks so glibly
about African culture, how would they like to return to wearing raffia skirts? How would
novelist Achebe like to go back to the mindless times of his grandfather instead of holding the
modern job he has in broadcasting in Lagos?” (57).
But this antipathy toward Achebe‟s novel was not restricted to European scholars.
Writing in 1959, Ben Obumselu, an African reviewer, criticized Achebe‟s novel for imitating a
European artistic form rather than transforming or imbuing it with an African color. Obumselu
claimed: “The form of the novel ought to have shown some awareness of the art of the culture.
We do not have the novel form of course, but there are implications in our music, sculpture and
folklore which the West African novelist cannot neglect if he wishes to do more than merely
imitate a European fashion” (qtd. in Bishop 88). Abdul R. JanMohamed in his article
“Sophisticated Primitivism” condemned Achebe‟s use of English language in the novel.
Questioning the possibility of true representation of African experience through “the alien
media” of the colonizer‟s language and literary forms, JanMohamed was of the firm belief that
these “media” inevitably alter the nature of African experience. Similarly, Obiajunwa Wali in
“the Dead End of Africa” undermined the assumption that the English language was a
10
“transparent window” through which an African writer adding a bit of African “flavor” could
represent an African world view. On this account, Obiajunwa dismissed the notion of Things
Fall Apart as an African novel due to its evident reference to W. B. Yeats‟ poem “Second
Coming” as well as borrowing “European modernist thematic concerns and narrative strategies.”
Thus, to Obiajunwa the protagonist of Things Fall Apart is no longer an Ibo man, but one with
English “inflection.”
Gilbert Phelps, however, defended Achebe‟s use of linguistic and artistic choice on the
ground of diversity of languages in Africa. He declared that of the approximately one thousand
different languages and dialects currently used in Africa, 250 ones are found in Nigeria. Phelps
averred that Achebe like a host of Nigerian writers realized that in order to communicate not
only with “English-speaking world,” but also with his “fellow-countrymen” he had no choice but
to use English (qtd. In Shaffer 75-76).
Gradually, Things Fall Apart achieved its international place as the most influential work
by an African writer. Daniel S. Burt, for instance, devoted an entire chapter to Achebe in his The
Most Influential Novelists, Playwrights, and Poets of All Time. To Burt, through the
protagonist‟s destruction Achebe produced an influential modern tragedy. He viewed the novel
as a “foundational document for Nigerian and wider African understanding of its colonial past
and postcolonial challenges” (357). Indeed, as David Whittaker put it, almost every
“conceivable” critical tendency has found its way to the text in the past fifty years (75). Chidi
Amuta, for instance, in his The Theory of African Literature provided a Marxist reading of
African literature in general and of Achebe‟s novel in particular. To Amuta, Things Fall Apart
concentrates on economic conflicts as much as the cultural ones. To him, the novel is in first
place a clash between two modes of production: capitalism and traditional African
11
communalism. Thus, the representation of the past not only signifies cultural values, but also
reveals economic condition and social relations of pre-colonial African society. As Amuta put it:
Things Fall Apart serves to furnish, albeit fictionally, the essential aspects of preliterate communalism. Its fictional world is one in which the basic unit of
organization is the village which also serves as the locus of communal life and
values. The village economy is essentially agrarian, depending for its subsistence
on land as the principal means of production. Manual labor applied through basic
iron tools – such as hoes or machetes – defines the dominant mode of production
while production relations are essentially communalistic, characterized by cooperation and mutual assistance. (81)
To Amuta, the cultural values of Umuofia, the Nigerian village under the concentration in the
novel, are directly related to its economic structure. He observed when Okonkwo openly defies
the colonizers, he is defending not only culture as “super-structural propositions,” but the whole
socio-economic structure (134). Furthermore, within this Marxist reading of Things Fall Apart,
Okonkwo is viewed as a revolutionary hero, a socialist one. He struggled against capitalism as
the leader of the nationalist independence movement, belonging to the revolutionary class of
peasantry (183).
Feminism was another critical approach finding its way to the novel. In “How Could
Things Fall Apart for Whom They Were Not Together?,” Florence Stratton addressed the
question of gender ideology in Things Fall Apart. She challenged the authority of the novel by
offering an alternative reading of it, one that disclosed its “male bias.” Stratton posed this very
question whether Achebe attempts to restore “dignity and self-respect” to African women. She
12
believed women are marginalized in the text and for the “notable” exception of Chielo, the
powerful priestess of Agbala, the status of women is very low. Achebe, Stratton noted, doe not
even name Okonkow‟s wives until the story is “well under way.” At the end of chapter one, they
are “merely numbers, representing an apparently minor part of Okonkow‟s achievement” (29).
Besides, women are depicted as mere objects circulated among their men folk, for instance from
a father to a son as part of an estate (ibid.). Stratton‟s reading of the novel also gives a different
portrait of Okonkwo. From this standpoint, he is an example of “male psychology” in a
patriarchal society in whose view women are inferior because of their otherness. Insisting on
“sexual otherness,” Okonkwo projects to women those features he most despises (33). Stratton
finally accused Achebe on the grounds that he uses the same “tropes” of representation of the
Other as colonialist novelists, with the slight difference that in the latter the Other are not the
native, but women (37).
Things Fall Apart was even examined in the light of Nietzsche‟s “revaluation of value.”
Alan Levine in his account of the novel announced both Nietzsche and Achebe, albeit creating
two different worlds make use of similar methodological device, namely, the revaluation of
values, Nietzsche‟s terminology to designate the replacing of one set of values with another
throughout a society and simultaneously revealing the relative nature of values. After providing a
rather detailed explanation of Nietzsche‟s terminology including “the will to power,” “master
morality,” and “slave morality,” Levine claimed that like Nietzsche, Achebe uses a revaluation
of values to attack Christianity. He also stressed on this very fact that to Nietzsche no system of
value or institution is based on reality, rather it is created by “human psychological drive.” To
Levine, Achebe is not after restoring the past in a simple sense of the word, since to him both
traditional Ibo and Christian culture are imperfect. However, Levine contended, Achebe does not
13
regard Umuofia as evil, rather he describes “the joy and free-spiritedness of the pre-Christian
Ibo,” a society reflecting master morality, as much as Nietzsche illustrates pagan morality before
the Christian revaluation. Like Nietzsche, Achebe seems to consider warrior culture “healthy”
and like Nietzsche he describes a “healthy” pagan master morality defeated by Christianity. To
Levine, Nwoye‟s conversion, Okonkow‟s only son, is an example of revaluation of value which
“tears the clan apart.” Thus for Achebe, with the appearance of missionary the values and
meanings of Ibo society reversed and that “revaluation” brought about the collapse. Yet, Levine
contended despite their similarities the two figures differ significantly:
Unlike Nietzsche, Achebe does not seem willing to embrace some of master
morality‟s darker aspect. … He does not uncritically embrace any single culture,
not even the traditional Ibo culture for which he seeks respect. He shows its ugly
sides too. Achebe lets the oppressed speak for themselves and depict them as full,
complex human beings; but these people like all people, suffer from human
weakness and have tragic flaws.
Accordingly, Levine concluded that a simple revaluation of value is not enough to Achebe and
Africa‟s problem. He declared that Things Fall Apart disclosed the historical origin of the
problem and in so doing opened a window to view Christian morality as historical construct, not
as representation of objective truth.
Good deals of existing criticism on Achebe‟s Things Fall Apart laud it for its authenticity
and the realistic representation of Africa. In other words, there is a consensus that the novel is a
“radical departure” from the way Africa and African have been presented in the past literature
(Whittaker 33). In 1991, the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, based
14
on a survey of several teachers of African literature in the U.S., Africa, and Europe, recorded
among the principal reasons for teaching this novel the perception that it offers: “an unusual
opportunity to discover the foreign from within” (qtd. in Snyder 179). Thus, even Obumselu had
to admit that: “Things Fall Apart is the first English novel in which the life and institution of a
West African people is (sic) presented from inside” (qtd. in Bishop 43). Likewise, JanMohamed
asserted that the novel offers an insight into African culture that has not been depicted before.
However, to him the novel is realistic as far as it illustrates “the lived experience of a
predominantly oral culture,” rather than representing that culture in terms of the Western written
tradition. He observed Achebe‟s style in Things fall Apart is in consonant with oral culture he
represents. He even claimed the success of the novel largely rides on this harmonious
relationship, given that the nature of oral culture is “alien” to most Western readers.
JanMohamed ended his argument, asserting Things Fall Apart is not an idealization of the past,
but an attempt to evoke the authenticity of traditional African culture.
To some critics, however, an indigenous account of Africa also served as a calculated
response to the colonialist discourse. In “Chinua Achebe Writing Culture: Representation of
Gender and Tradition in Things Fall Apart,” Kowadwo Osei-Nyame pronounced the novel is a
response to “paragraphing history” by European writers in which there is a relationship between
storytelling and the storyteller in the sense that the storyteller narrates the story the way he sees
it, not the way the “emperor” wants it to be told (17). Giving an anthropological reading of the
text, Oliver Lovesey in “Making Use of the Past in Things Fall Apart,” contended that narrating
past in postcolonial context is a “toolkit” in Achebe‟s hands assisting him to “write back
intertextually to the legacy of Kurtz‟s desire to „exterminate all brutes‟ ” (123). In a similar vein,
15