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Essay: Christianity, Parenting & Inevitability in Achebe’s ‘Things Fall Apart’

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  • Published: 21 February 2023*
  • Last Modified: 22 July 2024
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Claire Ahn

Kravchak

AP Literature: Period 2

11 November 2018

Title goes here

Hairline cracks in instruments lead to much larger cracks and a deterioration in sound. The same can be said of the lives we lead, small instances piling up to a more imminent problem. For Okonkwo, it is the influence of Christianity, visible through biblical allusions and parallels, and the European colonists, tainting the pure traditional life, the pure sound, he once knew. Alluding to an iconic line from William Butler Yeats’ poem, “The Second Coming” in its title, Chinua Achebe’s quintessential African novel Things Fall Apart contains biblical allusions to the classic story of Adam of Eve and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden, the parenting psychology behind Abraham and Isaac, the Last Supper, and the ultimate terrors of the book of Revelation—the Second Coming. Yeats, in his classic poem, exclaims that, “Things fall apart/The centre cannot hold” (Yeats 3) and perfectly describes the continuous unraveling of the book’s characters as the story progresses and the European colonists arrive with plans to spread Christianity to Umuofia.

As both psychological and religious forces blend and clash against each other in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo’s parenting for Nwoye and Ikemefuna, one of them an Isaac-like figure and the other a Christ-like figure, and they find themselves doomed to carry out the occurrences in the Christian Bible, ironic for two people whose village, once a beautiful and lush Eden-like paradise, is overtaken by the European colonists and Christianity, leading to the demise of the Igbo people and their culture, replaced with foreign ideals and leading to the disintegration of healthy father-son relationships. The events near the end of the novel signal a devastating reenactment of the Book of Revelation, bringing a combination of terror and relief to the characters who will, according to history, not gain their own independence for decades to come.

Therefore, an underlying message throughout the entirety of Things Fall Apart illustrates the striking inevitability of outsider psychological or religious influence, along with the influence of different parenting styles, especially because Things Fall Apart is a book Achebe originally wrote to provide an unbiased view of the Europeans’ conquest of the African land, and argues that we should be aware that the influence of other cultures and societies are sometimes inevitable, such as Christian influences on the people of Umuofia and Chinua Achebe’s writing, and to adapt to it and have a chance of returning to the past, we must realize we cannot root ourselves in the past; rather, we must live, unlike Okonkwo, for the present and the future.

Christian influences have been prevalent in Chinua Achebe’s life since he was a young boy, as described in Ruth Franklin’s New Yorker piece, “After Empire,” and Achebe never felt strong sense of belonging in either his own African roots or the European culture (Franklin). However, his experiences growing up in a post-European colonization Christian household in Africa would serve to define him throughout his college years and thus appear frequently in his literary work, often entrenched in the psychology of his characters’ behavior and parenting styles, such as in Okonkwo’s reckless behavior to Ikemefuna, the boy’s untimely murder in attempt to save his pride, Okonkwo’s expulsion from his home due to sin, and Nwoye rejection of Igbo ideals.

The first evident parallel of Things Fall Apart to the Christian Bible occurs during the murder of the Jesus-figure of Ikemefuna, a boy who called Okonkwo his son, cutting him down with a machete. In research carried out by the University of Alcala by Enrique and Fernando Galvan, God(s) Fall(s) Apart: Christianity in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, they claim that the “only “destitute” of importance is Ikemefuna, defined as a “Christ-figure” by Jonathan A. Peters (1978: 106), whose sacrifice motivates in some way Nwoye’s later conversion” (Galvan 106). On the other hand, Okonkwo serves as a Peter-like figure, once loyal to the boy but denying him when it matters the most, struggling to maintain his reputation and his pride by protesting that “Woman, I do not know him” (Luke 22:57). In the Bible story, Peter betrays Jesus through this denial, an attempt to save his reputation and pride, foretold in the Bible by a rooster crow and the Lord’s message (Luke 22:54-62).  In the end, Peter affirms that he loves Jesus and regrets his earlier actions, similar to how Okonkwo cannot eat for a few days after the killing of Ikemefuna, a desperate attempt to regain his torn pride. Later, he realizes he regrets his actions, and similarly Peter does the same when he went out “and wept bitterly” (Luke 22:62). Although at this earlier stage of the novel there are no European or Christian influences outwardly visible, as the traditional village of Umuofia is still hidden away from western society, the inevitable push toward Christianity and a westernized civilization inches closer. These two parallels are the first introduction of Christianity and serve to foreshadow the future colonization of Umuofia, one of Okonkwo’s biggest fears.

Another parallel is the story of Abraham and Isaac. Whereas Christianity only has one God, there are many gods and spirits in In the Bible, told in chapter twenty-two of Genesis, Abraham is told by God to sacrifice his son Isaac to test his devotion, and when he attempts to do so, following God’s order, God orders him to stop, saving Isaac. Similarly, Ikemefuna was a gift, a sacrifice, from another clan to begin with.

Whereas in the Bible, Abraham prepares to perform the sacrifice and burnt offering of his only son to demonstrate his dedication to God, Okonkwo cuts Ikemefuna down both in fear and to save his own pride, stripping himself of any paternal emotions. Psychologically, the main motivator behind Okonkwo’s murder of introduction of biblical themes into Achebe’s novel, a result of his own upbringing with Christian parents. Okonkwo sacrifices Ikemefuna for his own gods, but mostly for his own pride. His pride is wounded, and Ikemefuna is the bandage. According to Freud’s “On Narcissism,” our confidence comes partially from “our fulfillment of the imagined expectations of our ideal ego” (Freud). To fulfill those expectations, Okonkwo must remain manly and strong in front of his fellow peers. In other words, he must slay Ikemefuna without any hesitation, so he does. When he realizes all of that was for nothing later on in the book, he cannot accept the change or move on, so he is doomed to suicide.

The next allusion to Christianity in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart appears in the early father-son relationship between Okonkwo and his effeminate son Nwoye. In the first book of the Bible, Genesis, the patriarch Abraham and his son Isaac have a similar relationship with each other as that of Okonkwo and Nwoye.

A Freudian idea known as “Wunderblock,” described in a Library of Congress article entitled “Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture,” describes our attempts to erase and repress certain memories from our mind, but “Erasure, like repression, is only partially successful” (Freud). Earlier in Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo rejects all of his father Unoka’s nature, hoping to become more masculine and successful in life than him, trying his entire life to become on of his village’s lords, a very traditionalist idea. However, when he begins to see such effeminate values that his father had in Nwoye, those repressed memories emerge, and Okonkwo cannot handle the prospect of his son befalling the same fate his father did. When Nwoye displays feminine traits and demonstrates a keen interest in the European idea of Christianity

Unfortunately, Nwoye’s interest in Christianity turns out to be a symptom of the incoming European conquest of Umuofia and their culture, forcing Westernized values down their throat. However, Okonkwo—expelled from his Eden, Umuofia, due to an accidental murder halfway through the book—is not aware of this problem at first, believing his clan would fight against the Europeans and stand their ground, his faith entrusted in those values he sought to reflect his entire life—values of macho masculinity. His banishment from Eden is reminiscent of Eve, a product of Adam’s rib bone, falls temptation to the Devil in the book of Genesis, leading to both of their expulsions from Eden.

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