Okonkwo Character Analysis Essay Essay Sample.
In the novel Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe portrays a character, Okonkwo, as a strong and admired leader. Life is great in Umoufia, Nigeria. Until Okonkwo gets exiled from his village for seven years. During that time the European missionaries came and built a church in the Evil forest of Umoufia.
Character Analysis Okonkwo The protagonist of Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo is also considered a tragic hero. A tragic hero holds a position of power and prestige, chooses his course of action, possesses a tragic flaw, and gains awareness of circumstances that lead to his fall. Okonkwo's tragic flaw is his fear of weakness and failure.
Okonkwo is the antithesis to his father, for his father Unoka is a bum, who was in debt to everyone else in the clan, more or less. In the beginning of the book Chinua Achebe clearly states what Unoka is like, “In his day he was lazy and improvident and was quite incapable of thinking about tomorrow.” (C. Achebe, Things Fall Apart, Page 8).
Things Break Down: Okonkwo Character Analysis Essay. In the novel Things Fall Apart, strength and pride are very crucial elements of the primary character, Okonkwo, nevertheless, these traits might sound like excellent traits to have however because of the way he was raised, Okonkwo harbours a number of his emotions under an external shell of violence, strength and pride.
Okonkwo, who is the protagonist of the novel and one of the most powerful men in the Ibo tribe often resorts to violence to make his points understood. Down in his heart, Okonkwo is not a cruel man, but his life is dominated by his internal conflict, the fear of failure and of weakness. He hated his father, Unoka, because he was a lazy debtor.
However, a succinct analysis of the literature reveals that Okonkwo is an excellent central character. The novel depicts him as willful, and a traditionalist. Okwonkwo shows an acute awareness of the surprising difficulty of forgetting the past.
Things Fall Apart Literary Analysis Okonkwo and his father, Unoka, were two very different people.With just one wife and nothing to leave behind to his only son, Unoka was seen as a failure in the eyes of his village.Okonkwo, however, became a titled man with three wives and a successful harvest every season.