Home Is Where The Heart Is Character Analysis

It is said that home is where the heart is. The characters of “Things Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe and “The Poisonwood Bible” by Barbara Kingsolver are proof of this phrase. While they may face hardships at first, they grow to assimilate to their new environments and learn to love it. They learn to make the most of what they have and it shapes who they become as characters. Home can be explained by three different things according to Sonsyrea Tate. Home can be categorized as a dwelling, a place, or state of mind. When coming to the first explanation of “home” as a dwelling, we can look to the common trope that most people refer to “Home” as the house they grew up in. For example, in many cases children move to new houses and that becomes their new “home”. The second explanation of “home is where the heart is” refers to a state of mind in which home is where you feel safe and comforted. The idea of family is that state of mind that Sonsyrea is talking about. When home is where the
Okonkwo and Nathan are stuck in their ways and as a result they focus solely on their mission. The other characters in the book are able to focus on family and change in their lives. With this change they must adopt the idea that home is where the heart is, or they will feel distant. Okonkwo and Nathan both die due to their inability to find their home in their family. Nathan copes by focusing on religion and drills his ideology a little too deep and as a result he is executed. Okonkwo is so deeply bothered by his family turning to Christianity that he doesn’t realize they are still his family. His land has been taken by another man while he was gone and Okonkwo’s worldview leaves him to perceive he has nothing left. Okonkwo’s suicide embodies what it means to feel lost when you don’t believe in your bonds with a family. These men are substantially affected by their interpretation of “home”, and it brings them to their