![]() Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson are cases in point. This education was necessitated by the cultural identity crisis and its attendant threat of cultural annihilation – with which the African was faced – occasioned, as it was, by imperialism and a surfeit of existing literary outputs which portrayed the African in much less than pleasant colours. It does appear, as has been put forward by critics, that one of the reasons for which Achebe wrote the novel, Things Fall Apart was for the purpose of educating his readers about the value of his African culture. For instance, Abiola Irele, foremost critic of African literature, states that Achebe’s Things Fall Apart “has acquired the status of a reason of its character as a counterfiction of Africa, in specific relation to the discourse of Western colonial domination.” (Irele 2000:2). In effect, critics have, with good reasons, interpreted Achebe’s Things Fall Apart as his answer to the limited and mostly erroneous presentation of Nigerian life and customs found in literature written and indeed sanctioned by the colonial powers. Multiculturalism, imperialism or colonialism, intrusion of Christianity and the resilience of traditional Igbo belief: clash of civilisations (Mazrui 2012). Some of these interpretive channels include, but are by no means limited to, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe Review by Igboin Benson OhihonĬonsequent upon the avalanche of hermeneutic guides provided by Chinua Achebe himself in the construction of Things Fall Apart, critics and scholars have, over the past five decades untiringly pursued a myriad of interpretive possibilities in their various discourses on the text. Keywords: Semiotic pragmatism, Okonkwo, Peirce, Igbo’s religio-sphere, Unoka. This is the fulcrum that dictates reconstruction of the meta-life of Unoka, as an original and inevitable foundation that the protagonist, Okonkwo, and his son, Nwoye, could not surpass. ![]() Thus, through the gristmill of Peircean semiotic pragmatism, which revolves around Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness, it is argued that the fates of these three personae in the novel are the same, despite its denial within the text. Circumstantially, Unoka could not become an ancestor inadvertently or deliberately, Okonkwo could not become one either and consciously, Nwoye refused to become one. None of these three achieved the traditional, metaphysical height that defined fulfilment of a life well spent in Igbo’s religio-sphere. But the meta-life of Unoka formed an original and inevitable basis for the thought and consequences that pervaded the life of Okonkwo and his first son, Nwoye. This is evident in the fact that Unoka’s presence, as the author presented it in the novel, apparently ended in the very first chapter. The life of Unoka, the father of Okonkwo, the latter being the protagonist of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, had been dismissively concluded as inconsequential. Review Essay: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebeīy Igboin Benson Ohihon Adekunle Ajasin University, Nigeria.
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