Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: A Seminal Novel in African Literature

Komenan Casimir

doi:10.22158/sll.v4n3p55

Abstract

Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is an influential novel in African literature for three reasons. First, it is a novel meant to promote African culture; second, it is a narrative about where things went wrong with Africans; and third, it is a prose text which contributed to Achebe’s worldwide recognition. It contains Achebe’s rejection of the degrading representation of Africans by European writers, and fosters Africa’s traditional values and humanism. The excesses of Igbo customs led the protagonist to flagrant misuse of power. The novel’s scriptural innovations bring fame to Achebe who is considered as the “Asiwaju” (Leader) of African literature, the “founding father of African fiction”, or again the “Eagle on Iroko”.

Highlights

Colonial literature has portrayed Africans as savage people whose customs are simple and not highly developed, not to say nonexistent
As an African and as an African writer, Chinua Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart to take the opposite view. This novel has been written with a scriptural specificity, an African flavour, which imparts an intrinsic valuation to the work in African literature, where it is thought to be a seminal novel
The first section shows that Things Fall Apart has been written to further African/Igbo culture; the second and third parts respectively demonstrate that Things Fall Apart is a narrative about the root cause of Africa’s/Nigeria’s problem of political leadership, and that it brought Achebe international renown

Summary

Literature

Komenan Casimir1* 1 Department of English, Félix Houphouët-Boigny University of Cocody-Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire * Komenan Casimir, Department of English, Félix Houphouët-Boigny University of Cocody-Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire Received: June 1, 2020 doi:10.22158/sll.v4n3p55 Accepted: June 14, 2020 Online Published: June 27, 2020 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.22158/sll.v4n3p55

Introduction

Conclusion