Second Coming Things Fall Apart

¶ … Second Coming

Things Fall Apart and "The Second Coming": Reflection Paper

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The "rough beast" of W.B. Yeats' poem "The Second Coming" might seem to have an obvious parallel with Okonkwo, the African patriarchal figure who raises his children and treats his three wives with harshness and cruelty. However, the notion of a nightmare childhood also suggests that the beast of the title has more than one parallel in the tale. Another human parallel is the character of Okonkwo's natural-born son Nwoye. Nwoye is constantly reminded as he is growing up that he is not as manly as his father would wish him to be, and his father openly favors Ikemefuna, an adopted son from a rival tribe, over his own boy.

Nwoye, despite the competition that might seem to arise from this relationship, befriends Ikemefuna, but even this familial relationship becomes fraught with misery after an oracle of the tribe decides that the adopted boy must die, and Okonkwo helps kill the young man, even though Ikemefuna identifies him as a father-figure. Thus, according to the religion of the tribe, Nwoye loses one of his few friends and advocates within his familial structure, a lesson that turns him against both his father and his native people's ways.

Natural born familial relations are associated with misery and death for Nwoye. The only person he feels any kinship with is not his own flesh and blood, and his father kills this brother figure. Nwoye is reminded that he does not measure up to his father's standards, and is taught to fear becoming like his own grandfather, whom Okonkwo sees as weak -- out of fear and out of his own unstable sense of identity.

Both father and son for different reasons, reject their origins, and have a nightmare childhood. They are rocked by a hand of fear, not motherly nurturance. They are obsessed by their fears, of becoming like his father in the case of Okonkwo and of not becoming like his father in Nwoye's instance. However, Nwyoe, because of the cultural and political shifts endured by his native land, has another framework of self-definition that his father lacks -- the availability of another culture, namely that of the Christian missionaries who have come to the country. To find a new identity, Nwyoe literally as well as metaphorically slouches towards Bethlehem. Within the foreign doctrine of Christianity Nwoye finds a prop for his sense of self against which his father's African nationalism and masculinity ultimately proves to be powerless. Through the weakness advocated by Christianity (a false weakness, given the overarching ambitions of the missionaries to convert all African natives) Nwoye finally finds strength that his father's worldview cannot context.