Okonkwo as a problematic protagonist in Things Fall Apart

Okonkwo

The novel Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe is a story about the culture clash that occurs when white colonizers arrived on the African continent and attempted to force the indigenous population to accept the empirical culture. When the white people arrived in Africa, they perpetrated a campaign of superiority upon the indigenous peoples. They enslaved Africans and forcibly shipped them to toil on plantations for the rest of their lives. They also attempted to convert people from their native religions and force them into accepting Christianity. With this set up, it would be easy to make all white characters evil and all the African characters as purely good. However, Achebe does not do this. Instead the main character Okonkwo is a troubled, "problematic" hero who performs actions which are not at all heroic or good which makes him more complex and ultimately more real which is shown in the way he behaves towards others, in his personality, and finally his murder of an innocent person without any real reason for committing the action.

Okonkwo is the protagonist of the story and his conflicts within his own village and with the white colonizers are at the center of the novel. He remained unmoved by the white agenda and was uniquely able to comment on the changes in his community when he was finally able to return to Umuofia. Achebe writes, "Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart" (152). Okonkwo blames the white man and his belief system for all the changes in his community. He is adamantly against change and unwilling to see any potential good in the new system or in the improvements made by the missionaries leading him to act negatively in the name of cultural preservation.

There are other issues with Okonkwo throughout the novel's narrative which makes it difficult to identify with this character. Early in the novel, Achebe defines Okonkwo in unpleasant terms. "Perhaps down in his heart Okonkwo was not a cruel man. But his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and weakness. It was not external but lay deep within himself. It was the fear of himself, lest he should be found to resemble his father" (Achebe 13). Throughout the novel, Okonkwo commits acts of cruelty, of anger, and of violence against many of the other characters. He is the novel's hero and yet Achebe himself illustrates that Okonkwo is not a perfect man. Okonkwo acts cruelly and whether or not he is in fact a cruel man, he chooses to act unkindly and not heroically.

Late in the novel, the character of Ikemefuna is to be killed as ordered by the village's oracle. This young man has lived in the village for some time, has grown up in Okonkwo's house and helped raise his children as though he were a part of the family. One of the villagers tells Okonkwo of the death sentence and urges him not to participate. "Umuofia has decided to kill him. The Oracle of the Hills and the Caves has pronounced it. They will take him outside Umuofia as is the custom, and kill him there. But I want you to have nothing to do with it. He calls you father" (Achebe 57). Despite this, Okonkwo determines to go along and actually commits the murder himself. He cares more about being perceived as weak than about the bond that has formed between himself and his adopted son.