Dimensions of Intertextuality in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God

Abstract

The readings on Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God are, for the most part, steeped in Igbo culture and cosmology as well as the deployment of language in the texts. None, consequently, has taken up the question of examining both texts by means of Julia Kristeva’s theory of intertextuality. This research report occupies that critical void. Concretely, it utilizes select dimensions of Kristeva’s theory of intertextuality in investigating Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God. This is in order to understand what the characters are saying and what the narrator is saying, the role played by culture in these discourses, and whether the theory’s select dimensions apply to Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God. Ultimately, it is uncovered that indeed intertextuality is applicable to and exists in Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God by means of the various dimensions of the theory. By Kristeva’s account, these dimensions are the intersecting of citation and narration within the novel, dyadic figuration and arbitrary termination, the relationship between the literary text and the text of culture, the figure of double destinations, the horizontal dimension of the function of the symbol, the non-conformity between a named object and its name within the Symbol as Ideologeme, and the relationship between individual texts (books).