Academic Works

#1 How The Center Is made To Hold in Things Fall Apart by Neil Ten Kortenaar

Thesis: “How does Achebe establish his narrative authority when writing about a period more that fifty years in the past and more particularly about a world view that has lost its original integrity?” para 1

Main Points:

• The last chapter’s change of narration
• His humanization of characters
• 3rd person Omniscient affect
• Foil characters
• African vs. European
• Cultural insight vs. Objective insight
• Writing Techniques

#2 Women in Achebe’s World: A Womanist Critique by Rose Ure Mezu

Thesis:”Having been the first, so to speak, to scale the top of the Iroko, this eagle, Achebe, and other male eaglets after him, argueably have appropriated all that they have found there. This chapter will explore what is left for female eagles.”

Main Points:

• Traditional cultural approach to women
• Lack of female influence
• Chastity and virginity in Things Fall Apart
• Changing vision of women
• Modern feminism and womanism
• Women liberation

TFA #2

Chapter 25

This chapter is written more from the perspective of the district commissioner. The DC and his guards travel to Okonkwo’s hut after he has murdered the messenger. When The DC arrives there he finds Obierika and other elders from the village. When he asks where Oknonwo is he threatens to take the men to jail if they don’t deliver Okonkwo. The men lead them to where Ononkwo hung himself. From here the DC considers his options for including Okonkwo in a book he is writing of a history of Africa. The question is whether to devote a paragraph or a chapter to his. This is insulting to the reader. We have just spent an entire book learing about Okonkwo and coming to understand and respect this charecter, and now this white man wants to cast him off as nothing but a talking point and an animal. The DC’s book is to be a history but the way he writes it will not be a true history but an obscenely bias one.