“’You’re burning memory,’ he told her. ‘I am not.’ She would not place her memory on things that strangers could barge in and take away. ‘My memory is inside me.’” (Adichie, 2014: 432) This quote occurred at the end of the novel Half of a Yellow Sun in the very last pages. This is a great way to end off the novel because it shows that even though there has been a war and everything was taken away from all of the Igbo people; their family, their money their jobs, and all they have left is their memory of the war as well as all the trauma they had experienced. Odenigbo tell Olanna that she is a burning memory because she reminds him all the bad memories they have made throughout the war and it hurts to see her and remember all of these things.
In Half of a Yellow Sun, Adichie portrays Olanna as an extremely strong and independent women. Olanna is also a wife of a university lecturer Olanna also goes through many different highs and lows in this novel, and her character continuously changes and surprises us. At the beginning of the novel Adichie portrays Ugwu as a curious little boy that is a house boy for Olanna and Odenigbo. Throughout the novel Ugwu too changes and we see how in certain situations Ugwu is prepared to compromise his integrity to please other characters. Different characters are affected by the war in many ways in my opinion Olanna and Ugwu is the characters that are most affected by the war. Olanna finds out about the war when she was visiting her ex-partner, by the name of Mohammed, and at first Olanna thought it was a small conflict between people but when she had gone outside and was disguised as a Muslim she had seen that the thing she thought was conflict it was actually a war and Olanna