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Character of Okonkwo
Assignment
Topic:
Character of Okonkwo.
Maharaja
Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University.
Department of English
2015-2016
Baldaniya
Vanita
Roll No: 29
Class: M. A.
Part-2
Subject: The
African Literature
Paper No: 14
Guidance by:
Prof. Dr. Dilip Barad
Character of Okonkwo
hero of Things for Apart.
“The protagonist of Things Fall Apart,
Okonkwo is also considered a tragic hero. A tragic hero holds a position of
power and prestige, chooses his course of action, possesses a tragic flaw, and
gains awareness of circumstances that led to his fall.”
Okonkwo an influential clan leader in
Umuofia. Since early childhood, Okonkwo’s embarrassment about his lazy,
squandering, and effeminate father.
Unoko, has driven him to succeed. Okonkwo’s hard work and prowess in war
have earned him a position of high status in his clan, and he attains wealth
sufficient to support three wives and their children. Okonkwo’s tragic flaw is
that he is terrified of looking weak like his father.
As a result, he behaves rashly bringing a
great deal of trouble and sorrow upon himself and his family. Okonkwo, the son of the
effeminate and lazy Unoko, strives to make his way in a world that seems to
value manliness. In so doing, he rejects everything for which he believes his
father stood. Unoka was idle, poor, profligate, cowardly, gentle, and
interested in music and conversation.
Okonkwo consciously adopts opposite
ideals and becomes productive, wealthy, thrifty, brave, violent, and adamantly
opposed to music and anything else that he perceives to be “soft”, such as
conversation and emotion. He is stoic to
a fault.
Okonkwo achieves great social and
financial success by embracing these ideals. He marries three women and father
several children. Nevertheless, just as his father was at odds with the values
of the community around him, so too does to changing times as the white man
comes to live among the Umaofians. As it because evident that compliance rather
than violence constitutes the wisest principle for survival, Okonkwo realizes
that he has become a relic, no longer able to function within his changing
society.
Okonkwo is a tragic hero in the classical
sense: although he is a superior character, his tragic flaw the equation of
manliness with rashness, anger, and violence brings about his own destruction.
Okonkwo is gruff, at times, and usually enable to express his feelings. But his
emotions are indeed quite complex as his “manly” values conflict with his
“unmanly” ones, such as fondness for Ikemefuna and Ezinma.
The narrator privileges us with information
that Okonkwo’s Fellow clan members do
not have that Okonkwo surreptitiously follows Ekwefi into the forest in pursuit
of Ezinma, for example and thus allows us to see the tender, worried father beneath
the seemingly indifferent exterior.
As an uncompromising man’s man, Okonkwo’s
relationship towards his family is one of complete dictatorship. His three
wives are there to serve him food and raise his children. By seeing them as his
subjects, Okonkwo can justify his brutal behavior against them. He can beat his
wives without guilt.
He can threaten Ekwefi with a gun when she
talks back. He can rebuke Nwoye for listening to old wives’ tales. This sense
of okoership is exemplified when Okonkwo takes Ikemefuna’s life. Though he does
have qualms about killing Ikemefuna, they are not qualms about whether or not
he has the right to do it. Okonkwo feels complete ownership over his family.
There is, however, the problem of love
and intimacy. Okonkwo rarely shows there aspects of himself since him but the
emotion soft and feminine but the emotions are there nonetheless. The fact that
he lies to Ikemefuna to protect the boy from fear and later feels quilt about
killing him are proof of that Okonkwo isn’t devoid of positive human emotions.
But, whenever ther is a clash between
showing true emotion and maintaiing the show of his strength, Okonkwo will
always gowith the latter.
This doesn’t mean that Okonkwo never
admits he is wrong more than anything. Okonkwo tries to fellow the laws of the
clan. Whenever he breaks them- either deliberately through a loss of temper of
inadventently as in shooting the boy- he never questions the punishments
brought upon him.
Okonkwo abides by his punishment whether
or not he thinks they are fair. This is one way of maintaining his honor and
reputation. He reads the laws literally. Unlike his father who bent the rules
and tried to circumvent certain aspects of the law.
Thus we come to one of the central
conflicts in the novel. THE DIVIDE BETWEEN Okonkwo’s personal pride and the
actions forced on him by the external social laws of the Umuofia. His final act
of suicide is the ultimate demonstration of things falling apart because it is
the first and only time that Okonkwo Purposefully and calculatedly breaks the
clan laws.
As a character, Okonkwo remains pretty
consistent throughout the book, we seen no sudden changes in behavior or
mindset; in fact, that may be Okonkwo’s problem, his inability to adapt or compromise
his ethics to changing situations that call for more tolerance or compassion.
Okonkwo, whose sense of pride and dignity continues until the end. Chooses to
live and die on his own terms rather than submit to the white man. For Okonkwo,
giving in would be against so much of what he has stood for courage, tradition,
and manliness.
Okonkwo is also considered a tragic hero.
A tragic hero holds a position of power and prestige, chooses his course of
action, possesses a tragic flaw, and gains awareness of circumstances that led
to his fall. Okomkwo’s tragic flaw is his fear of weakness and failure. In his
thirties. Okonkwo is a leader of the lgbo community of Umuifia, Achebe
describes
….. him as
“tall and huge” with “bushy eyebrows and wide nose him a very severe look”.
When Okonkwo walks, his heels barely
touch the ground, like he walks on springs, “as if he going to pounce on
somebody”. Okonkwo “stammers slightly” and his breathing is heavy.
Okonkwo is renowned as a wrestler, a
fierce warrior, and a successful farmer of yams. He has three wives and many
children who live in huts on his compound. Throughout his life, he wages a
never ending battle for status; his life is dominated by the fear of weakness
and failure. He is quick to anger, especially when dealing with men who are
weak, lazy debtors like his father.
However, Okonkwo over compensates for his
father’s womanly ways, of which he is ashamed, because he does not tolerate
idleness or gentleness. Even though he feels inward affecting at times. He
never portrays affection toward anyone. Instead, he isolates himself by exhaling
anger through violent, stubborn, irrational behavior. Okonkwo demands that his
family work long hours despite their age or imitated physical stamina, and he
nags and beats his wives and son Nwoye, who Okonkwo believes is womanly like
his father, Unoka.
`okonkwo is
impulsive; he acts before he thinks. Consequently, Okonkwo offends the lgbo
people and their traditions as well as the gods of his clan. Okonkwo is advised
not to participate in the murder of Ikefemuna, but he actually kills Ikefemuna
because he is “afraid of being thought weak”.
When the white man brings Christianity to
Unuofia, Okonkwo is opposed to the new ways. He feels that the changes the
require compromise and accommodation two qualities that Okonkwo finds
intolerable. Too proud and inflexible, he clings to traditional beliefs and
mourns the loss of the past.
When Okonkwo rashly kills a messenger
from the British district office, his clansmen back away in fear; he realizes
that none of them support him and that he can’t save his village from the
British colonists. Okonkwo is defeated. He commits suicide, a shameful and
disgraceful death like his father’s.
Okonkwo plays a major role in the novel
and is projected as a heroic figure and a wrestler who is constantly at war
with others. With his ‘chi’ his legacy of his father whom he despises, his own
character and finally, with the white man. Okonkwo’s world consists of the nine
villages from Umuofia to Mbaino and areas outside of these boundaries have little
significance to him, belonging simply to that vague realm “beyond”. He gives a
lot of importance to personal achievments bring honor to the village which in
turn emphasized the close tie between the individual and society.
Yet Okonkwo has his weakness and it is
these weaknesses that ultimately destroy the life he has created for himself.
His self-determination is not only controlled by internal but external forces
as well.
His impulsive and rash nature makes him
break the rules of the sacred week of peace. It is his carelessness that
results in his banishment from his village for seven years, and finally, it is
again his fiery and rash temper which pushes him to kill a white man and
consequently pushes him to take his own life.
Okonkwo is a man who has grown up in a community
that, because of its passionate desire for survival, places its faith in the
individual quality of ‘manliness’. And it is an irony of fate that makes him
start off with a disadvantage. On this score- the failure of his father that
compels him to an excessive adherence of the social code. This transforms every
positive value that he has to into a weakness.
Also, he pursues achievement with an
obsessive single mindedness that eventually degenerates into egocentricity. He
thus, virtually flounders through his life, with the minor problems. Which instead
of strengthening him, carry him to a point of dissolution. The novel reflects
this degeneration with respect to the traditional African way of life, Hence
the title of the novel. “Things Fall Apart”.
