Things Fall On Yeats

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Things Fall on Yeats Chinua Achebe’s novel, Things Fall Apart is a postcolonial novel which combats the stereotypical views the Europeans have on the Africans. Very powerfully yet passionately, not to mention rationally, Achebe draws his sword upon the oxidant, providing a story from the point of view of the Africans; he successfully describes reasons for such accusable behavior, while at the same time, allows the reader room for hatred towards the colonizers. Chinua Achebe titled his novel after the third verse in William Butler Yeats’s poem, “A Second Coming”. The similarities between Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Yeat’s “A Second Coming” can be discussed from countless perspectives; generally, they both deal with the issue of disorder, destruction, and the honor lost on the path to power. In Achebe’s novel, we are presented with a society that slowly begins to lose its tradition and culture as a result of submitting to the white men. Sardonically, the missionaries, who are strong believers in God, use the idea and concept of God and the church to slowly rule over and take control of the clan. In relation to the Yeats’s poem, the emphasis in the first couple of lines gives one the feeling that grip or control over something is being lost, in the case the clan it would be how they begin to lose their culture over time: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;” The missionaries confuse the clan so severely to the extent that they no longer know what to believe in, “Mere anarchy is loosened upon the world”, where we have people rebelling against the clan and the church. The following lines of the poem depict the chaos as the missionaries and the clan members decide to act. Last but not least, the “revelation”, or “second coming”, would be when Okonkwo kills himself to
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