Is Okonkwo a Tragic Hero?

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Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart” is a haunting novel of a man’s life, family and community destroyed by fate’s fatal fetish for tragedy. Like a swarm of locusts devastating the crops of farmers, who worked hard to maintain their only source of food, the White Man eventually gnawed the life out of the Ibo tribe and laid waste to the culture of the innocent men and women of Umuofia. Okonkwo, the main protagonist of the novel, was one of the people of Ibo tribe to realize the White Man’s doing and defy him. He has been hailed as a tragic hero by many academics and readers of the novel. However, this is due to the misunderstanding of the definition of a tragic hero, for which the great philosopher Aristotle has provided a set of requirements called the “Poetics” that one must fulfil in order to become truly tragic. Hence, by following this set of requirements strictly, I wish to propose an alternative view point to the daunting issue: that Okonkwo was and will never be a tragic hero in this magnificent classic of African Literature. The first requirement of Aristotle’s Poetics to be a tragic hero is a noble birth, and since Okonkwo is not of noble birth, he cannot be called a tragic hero. “With a father like Unoka, Okonkwo dis not have the start in life which many young people did”. Okonkwo’s father Unoka, “was a debtor”, “lazy and improvident” and when he “died, he had taken no title at all and was heavily in debt”. Okonkwo’s father left him to fend for himself with accumulated debts and he started off life with little possessions and lowly status in society. He worked as if he was “possessed” and persevered to rise through the ranks to become one of the “egwugwu”, or leaders of the tribe. Although it may be argued that Okonkwo eventually built his status, it is undeniable that without a noble birth, it would be extremely difficult to be a tragic hero or

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