Things fall apart

Things Fall Apart
Ibo Society revolves around the traditional culture. The basic and major reason behind “Things fall apart” for the Ibo villages is the cultural collision and complexity. Achebe presents the clash of culture as his major theme in the book Things fall apart. This clash not only occurs on the individual level, but also on the society level. In this way the cultural misunderstanding cut both the ways. There is an issue of flexibility and rigidity of the characters contributing to their destiny. According to the critic Miller “What we see here in Achebe’s book is what happens when cultures collide” which explains the clashes that started taking place in Ibo after Christianity was introduced. In Things fall apart we see how things start falling apart when different customs and religious beliefs collide with the traditional beliefs in Ibo culture. Okonkwo is a strong man who beliefs firmly in the Ibo culture. He is very rigid which seems to be destined for self destruction because of his inflexible nature and this was even long before the arrival of the European colonizers. It has been seen that when the white man brings Christianity to the Umuofia, then Okonkwo was exposed to new ways. He thought that the new culture was destroying the Igbo culture because this new culture demanded compromise and accommodation. This new belief and culture of Christianity was brought to the Igbo and this is where the conflict actually started and Okonkwo was in a complete quest to fight against this culture to preserve Igbo own culture
In Igbo own culture another clash comes when Nwoye, Okonkwo son from his first wife, had confusions in his mind and turmoil in the beginning of the novel while Okonkwo wants him to grow into a tough young man “…capable of ruling his father’s household when he was dead and gone to join the ancestors…”(2882). He was more into accepting the new faith brought by the white men because this new faith appears to be more compassionate and tolerant in his eyes as compared to the Igbo culture while his father wanted him to perverse the Igbo culture. Okonkwo whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and weakness. He had the fear of evil and the magic and believed in whatever Oracle say this shows that how Okonkwo was broken from within.
According to Obierika “the white man "has put a knife in the things that held us together, and we have fallen apart" (2934). This shows that he believed that the whole tribe has been torn away. He states that this is our fault that we allowed that white man to enter our culture and considered him foolish. The whole point of the novel rose because of the less tolerance level which Okonkwo and other village people had for the new culture and thus were not ready to accept this new culture which eventually resulted in destructive cultural clash.
Work cited
Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart.The Norton Anthology of World Literature. 2nd ed. Ed. Sarah Lawall and Maynard Mack. New York: Norton, 2002. 2860-2948. Print
Diane Rehm Show. “A Discussion of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart.” May 21, 1999. Callaloo 25.2 (2002) 597-611. Project Muse. Web. 16 April 2007. [note: cite the critics named here from Rehm’s interview]