Commentary- Things Fall Apart

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The selected passage is from Chinua Achebe’s award winning novel: “Things Fall Apart”. Published in 1958, two years before the independence of Nigeria. With a strong purpose to present a dynamic and complex society to the Western audience who perceived the African society and cultures as primitive or undeveloped. Achebe uses intimate relations between the reader and the characters to really insert the reader into the Igbo culture and portray it’s beauties and also its downsides before and after the arrival of Christian missionaries, strong imagery is used to deliver a strong and exhilarating message to the audience from other continents that have been reading misinterpreted novel by writers such as Joseph Conrad or Joyce Cary, whom are both from the Western world and have first hand experience with African culture, Achebe felt that he needed to express a different point of view and not just another interpretation. Firstly, to sum up this detail and deceit filled extract, we can contemplate that it shows the beginning of the “journey” towards the inhumane slaughter, or so said “sacrifice” of Ikemefuna, a fifteen-year-old boy from the Mbaino clan who is thrown at Umuofia as a sacrifice for the killing of one Umuofian woman, after three years and close interaction with Okonkwo’s family, the elders order Ikemefuna to be killed. Short paragraphs used by Achebe creates a sense of urgency and suspicion for this extract, focusing on details and of course main points, the author want’s to trick the reader into thinking like Ikemefuna (not knowing what where he is going) thus creating a suspense and a mysterious feeling. The words that Ikemefuna believed were that he was actually going “home”, to his beloved mother and sister. There was a “faint beating of the ekwe” (chapter 7) signifying a peaceful dance where a man receives the title of his clan followed by a feast,

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