Question 1

Why is Things Fall Apart considered so important in African literature?

Accepted Answer

Things Fall Apart was the first novel by an African author to reach a genuinely international audience, and its importance is both literary and cultural. Before Achebe, African life in English-language fiction was largely filtered through the perspective of European characters: Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Kipling, the adventure novels. Achebe set out to write a novel that showed Igbo society before and during colonization from the inside — its social structures, its oral literature, its religious practices, its internal conflicts — without condescension and without the apologetics that would make it palatable to a Western audience. He showed that African civilization did not need to be measured against European civilization; it had its own terms. The novel has now sold over twenty million copies and been translated into more than fifty languages; it is taught in schools across Africa, Europe, and North America and has shaped the entire subsequent tradition of African fiction in English.

Question 2

What does the title Things Fall Apart mean?

Accepted Answer

The title comes from W.B. Yeats's poem 'The Second Coming' (1919): 'Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.' Achebe uses Yeats — one of the canonical poets of European Modernism — to frame a story about the destruction of Igbo civilization, which creates an immediate irony: the poem that Yeats wrote about the disintegration of European order becomes, in Achebe's deployment, a description of what European order does to others. The 'things' that fall apart are the social, spiritual, and cultural structures that give Okonkwo's world its coherence — the hierarchy of titled men, the week of peace, the role of the egwugwu, the relationship between Umuofia and its neighbors. The 'centre' that cannot hold is the Igbo community itself.

Question 3

Is Okonkwo a tragic hero?

Accepted Answer

Okonkwo is one of the great tragic figures of twentieth-century fiction, though the question of whether he is a 'tragic hero' in the classical sense is complicated. He has the tragic hero's defining qualities: exceptional strength and achievement; a fatal flaw (his terror of weakness, which he associates with his failed father Unoka, drives him to a rigidity and violence that repeatedly destroys what he loves); and a fall from greatness that is connected to but not entirely caused by his flaw. But the colonial context complicates the classical pattern: Okonkwo's tragedy is not only personal but historical. Even a wiser or more flexible Okonkwo would not have been able to resist the dissolution of Umuofia's way of life; what he could have done is responded to that dissolution with more understanding and less destructive pride. The novel mourns both Okonkwo's personal tragedy and the larger tragedy of the world he represents.

Things Fall Apart Reading Order

Complete Things Fall Apart Book List